knofun

I have been using StumbleUpon’s Paid Ads for a few weeks now, and have some feedback.

Biggest thing: Budgets
Right now you can set a daily budget for all your ads, which seems cool but is really ineffective. This is compounded by some of the problems below and I will get into those. Yes I know you can in theory control this by using the # of visitors per campaign option, but is still not as effective as saying “spend $100 on this campaign per day.” This allows us to more accurately measure ROI using the SU program.

Setup vs options
When you set up a new campaign, you can only set destination url and one category. Once your campaign gets approved you can go in and add some paramaters like Country / State / City targeting and gender / age range of visitor. Cool, but why can’t I do that on setup? Also being able to select one category is really limiting. Why can’t I say show this page to people that have these 3 categories but NOT this one or show it to anyone who has any of these 3 categories? Seems pretty simple.

Let me know!
You have my email address, use it! Because of the manual approval process (which I understand completely, you don’t want spam/pr0n sites whatever), we have no idea when our campaigns go live. So you end up with a situation like I had this morning, where I had an old campaign in there that had run out of $$$ so wasn’t running. I added some new campaigns and then added some $$$ for them and went to sleep. When I checked them this afternoon the old campaign had resumed and sucked up most of my daily budget. So yeah its my bad for not pausing it, but at least let me know when campaigns are approved and start getting traffic. Also if I had a daily budget per campaign, this could be avoided.

Basically, I love SU’s ads program, $0.05 per semi-targeted visitor is cheap, and SU traffic is generally pretty good. I always average over 2 pageviews per user and under a 30% bounce rate. Pretty good no matter what your content is.

geek stuff, stumble, ventures, web marketing marketing, stumble, stumble upon, traffic

Wow. Someone write this down as a historical day for internet marketing. Oh wait, I am. Let me preface this by saying I use StumbleUpon a lot. I am an avid Stumbler and Stumble Marketer, and I participate in a lot of group Stumble marketing so when I find a new technique that seems intruiging, I pay attention.

So to the good stuff. I fired up Firefox (yeah i meant to say that) this morning and had a wierd red 1 by the stumble button. Curious of course, I moused over it and it said I had a “site waiting for me.” Wow, I’ve been working in web development for 9 years and I’ve never had a “site waiting for me.” Naturally, I was excited. I clicked, and got a message from a SU user drcoolj telling me about a house for rent in Canada. I am friends with drcoolj so I am sure we have done some SU exchanges in the past, but this is a whole new level of SU marketing.

I did some investigation (clicked one button on the toolbar) and found that he accomplished this through the “sent to” functionality of SU. Currently there is no way (that I saw, am I wrong?) to send a page to all your friends at once, but even with a rapid fire cut and paste recommendation it seems pretty effective. Nice idea drcoolj, especially for something like a rental ad.. immediate google love!

geek stuff, stumble, web marketing seo, stumble, stumble upon