I’m sure by now most of the readers of this site are familiar with the social bookmarking site called StumbleUpon. However, everyone might not be aware of their StumbleUpon Advertising program. When you sign up for the program, StumbleUpon allows you to have users driven to your site when they click the “Stumble!” button on their toolbar. Each visits costs $0.05. The best part is that you can pinpoint the type of users you want coming to your site with a great degree of specificity.

At the tail end of the summer, I decided to give StumbleUpon Advertising a shot with my golf stat tracking site. I chose men and women, ages 18-99 living in the United States with an interest in golf and drove them to the front page of Fore Score Golf Stats.

The Results

I ran a handful of campaigns over the course of three weeks with the same demographics that I mentioned above. The very first visit from my very first campaign resulted in a new account signup on Fore Score and I thought we were off to the races. Approximately 360 clicks later, that initial success was about as good as it was going to get for me with StumbleUpon.
The number of new accounts that signed up from StumbleUpon has been insignificant in comparison to the number of new users Fore Score has gained from every other traffic method known to modern man. Here are some of the really gory particulars from the three weeks:

Pages/Visit: 1.31
Avg. Time on Site: 00:00:16
Bounce Rate: 88.98%

My Conclusions

The bounce rate of StumbleUpon users is nasty. I had read around a bit before I got into this and most of the reports similar to this one had stats in line with what I received. The attention span of a StumbleUpon user is terrible and using their advertising to lead to direct conversions of traffic is probably not a very good strategy. My biggest mistake was pushing people straight to the front page of Fore Score instead of the page describing the site’s features or a page built specifically for StumbleUpon users to try and grab their attention better.

Would I ever use StumbleUpon Advertising again? Actually, maybe. There’s something to be said for the instant traffic gratification it gives you. In addition to that, the one main benefit I can see with StumbleUpon Advertising is that it increases the chance of more people marking your site as “I like It!” which, down the line, will bring in more natural traffic that you don’t need to pay for.