More About Stumbleupon

A couple of weeks ago I started advertising GMtee at Stumbleupon. Here's my previous post about testing the appeal of our new site.

So far we've spent US$400. At $0.05 per click that's 8,000 unique visitors. Unfortunately we can't track conversions from Stumbleupon and I've seen no evidence that any of those visitors made a purchase. While it's possible that one or two sales resulted, I am sure that we came nowhere near recovering the cost of the traffic from direct sales.

Their campaign management interface is simple to use, but reports too little information about results. I had set up ten different campaigns with variations on age, gender and country. That is, GMtee home page was shown to either men or women in one of four countries: USA, Canada, UK or Australia.

Some campaigns were restricted to 18 - 55 year old Stumblers. These produced less traffic because Stumbleupon doesn't always know the age of it's members. Most traffic came from the US with only a small contribution from the other three countries.

I was disappointed that the ratio of "thumbs up" to "thumbs down" was not reported individually for each campaign. Instead the report showed only one overall approval rating (which held steady around 75%). I could have calculated individual campaign ratings from other information provided, but frankly it didn't seem to be worth the effort.

I had already concluded that our return on investment at Stumbleupon is unlikely ever to be positive. As a bonus though, I think that GMtee will continue to receive traffic even after we stop advertising, since it is in their own interest for Stumbleupon to include highly rated sites in their rotation. From time to time I will masquerade as an impartial stumbler and give the thumbs up to our own pages!

There's an intangible benefit from promoting GMtee to thousands of stumblers. Hopefully we are noticed by people who are also active on other social sites and it's possible that we could benefit from some viral networking. (That assumes you think GMtee is cool enough to tell your friends!)

Something odd happened. During the first few days of the campaign, GMtee was receiving between one and two thousand visits daily. Then the traffic dried up even though our budget had not been spent. I tried creating a new campaign in a different category (clothing instead of fashion), but it was not approved for some reason.

Next I created a new campaign in both categories, but this time pointing to our Men's T-shirts page. I restricted the traffic to men in the US. Almost 1,000 visits have been recorded and the approval rating by this group for this page is up to 85%. It's not a big sample, but woohoo! So now I've deposited another $100.