StumbleUpon is a great site for when you have a few minutes to waste and want to find something new and interesting that fits with your general interests. It tracks what you are interested in and what pages you like and offers you similar pages.
When trying to get some traffic and links to Email It In I found a page talking about how you could pay StumbleUpon for paid clicks, and the cost per click is extremely low. I figured spending $100 there to try it out would be a reasonably cheap experiment.
I invested $20 per day for 5 days, targeting business and technical people. After the 5 days my average cost per click was 7.5c – significantly lower than Google AdWords (which runs about $1 per click for my keywords) and Facebook adverts.
Here’s the results:
So StumbleUpon generated lots of traffic, just as predicted, but it made zero difference to Goal Completions (signups). In short, while the traffic is cheap, the value is extremely low.
I don’t really have to think too hard to understand why – StumbleUpon users aren’t looking for the kind of web page presented by Email It In – they are looking for interesting content like blog posts on topics that interest them. There’s nothing on Email It In which would engage them.
Having said that, I’m glad I did the experiment, and for the right kind of content StumbleUpon Paid Discovery may be the right way to get your site out there – it’s way cheaper than the alternatives.
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