knofun

I cruise the web a lot using services like StumbleUpon. I recently stumbled on this site that apparently does some kind of web-mobile sms stuff. Like just texting from your phone, but with ads attached to your messages. Ok sorry thats a topic for another post entitled “Dumb as a rock business models and why they don’t work.”

At any rate, this guy is using AdBrite’s solution for in-text ads. I guess adbrite calls them “Inline ads” whatever. Check out his intro page:

That’s 8 words linked. Out of 62 words in the opening text, 13% of them are trying to get you somewhere else than the website’s original intent. I know you have to make money, all that but this end result is just unacceptable, from every point of view. As a visitor do I want to ever see this big pile of advertising again? As an advertiser, do I really want my message portrayed to the end user in this fashion? As an ad network, does AdBrite really make more money like this? As a website owner am I proud to show off this website? I can see linking all those words if they were all high value keywords, like if I was listing off a bunch of cool new gadgets like ipod,zune,iphone,digital camera I could potentially see the value in linking each of those. But AdBrite is linking words like present, sign, start, send. Let’s see what happens when you mouse over the word “send” :

Not sure what they are doing, but there is clearly very little relevance between the word they are linking and the ad they are displaying. Where is the value for anyone here? This is just unnecessary clutter.

Attention AdBrite Publishers! Use a real in-text advertising solution, ZinText. Relevancy.. every time.

other adbrite, stumble, zintext

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