In this post I intend to share my user experience with StumbleUpon and answer this question: Does a StumbleUpon Campaign actually work to help drive quality traffic to your site. The short answer - NO. At least that was my experience.
I started a website (www.snigit.com) as a way for people to post unique and interesting photos to a website via their mobile phone (like an iPhone). In an effort to drive traffic to the site I decided to set up a StumbleUpon campaign. I’d heard good things about StumbleUpon and I figured spending a small amount to experiment with it (in my case $25) would be worthwhile.
I sent $25 in funds to StumbleUpon via PayPal (you can send more or less $ depending on your traffic goals) and set up a $1/day campaign (campaign lasted ~ 25 days).
I certainly received traffic daily. But the average time spent on the site was terrible (seconds rather than minutes) and there was almost never more than 1 page visited by any of the Stumblers. Taking a close look at my HiStats log illustrates my point nicely.
You can see almost my entire StumbleUpon campaign (from the 13th through the 2nd). Note - Click on the image to make it larger. Disregard anything outlined in red since those jumps in page views represent traffic from me uploading pictures and making changes to the site. The green boxes around the tips of the blue bars represent stumblers who actually clicked on a page within my site (ie visited more than just the homepage).
You can see that for the most part the number of visitors closely matched the number of page views - which means the people who stumbled my site left without poking around and visiting multiple pages. This isn’t the kind of quality traffic I was looking for, especially when I’m paying for hits!
Even more frustrating was the fact that all my stumbles happened within the first few minutes after midnight. I know that there are thousands (millions?) of people using StumbleUpon, but it looked pretty suspicious to me to see all the traffic within about 5 minutes. Oh, and I upped my daily max to $5 to see if that stretched out the traffic and it didn’t, it only took 4 minutes for 101 hits (but I got an extra hit somehow).
Here is a screen shot of a typical 24hour view of traffic for snigit.com. Sad, isn’t it? You can see how I got 18 visitors in the first hour (actually within the first few minutes of the new day via StumbleUpon), then one visitor at 8am, one at 8pm, and one at 10pm for a total of 20 visitors that day.
Also, and this is the most important part. Despite having plenty of content (over 100 posts of fun and interesting photos) I didn’t receive a single comment or post (remember the site is setup so readers can post their own pictures) from a single StumbleUpon visitor throughout the entire 25 day campaign.
So from my experience, StumbleUpon was a miserable failure and a complete waste of $25 dollars - but I did learn a lot. Now, your results may vary greatly. You may have amazing content, or you may luck upon a post that gets stumbled and dugg to infinity and beyond propelling you into blog-stardum. But probably not. I consider www.snigit.com to be a very reasonable example of what a normal “Everyday Joe” kind of blog might be like.
So if you’re an “Everyday Joe” (or “Jan”) with regular content, don’t be surprised if your paid StumbleUpon campaign doesn’t net you great traffic rewards. It might not. Remember what StumbleUpon does, it allows users to add a “Stumble” button to their browser that they can use to randomly explore new sites. Unfortunately, some (many?) of those stumblers are just hitting the Stumble button, glancing at your site, and hitting the Stumble button again. The fact that they list “Top Stumblers” on the StumbleUpon web page would suggest that the creators of the site not only know that some stumblers do this, they encourage it!
Oddly, whenever I hit the stumble button out of boredom, I find myself reading the content (and sometimes commenting) on many of the blogs that I stumble upon (pun intended). So I was surprise that out of 500 StumbleUpon visitors ($25 dollars @ $0.05 per visitor = 500 visitors) no one commented on any of my posts and few looked at additional pages of content.
Now, there is a silver lining. While setting up this site last week I discovered EntraCard.com and setup an account. I noticed that my traffic for this site (TYsTIPs.com) with EntraCard has been exceptional compared to snigit’s traffic. Here’s a screen shot of my HiStats data for TYsTIPs.com - you can see the difference too.
The red bars are new visitors, the yellow bars are total visitors, and the blue bars are page views. You want nice tall blue bars because it means that your visitors are looking at multiple pages and exploring the content of your site. Also, if the yellow bars are higher than the red bars, that means that visitors are returning to your site - return visitors are also good. And 1 more thing, since starting EntraCard 4 days ago I’ve had my fist 2 subscribers to my RSS feed. Note: TYsTIPs.com is less than a week old and it has already received more traffic than the first month of snigit.com.
Lets take another look at snigit.com’s traffic. I’ve outlined in orange where I started using EntraCard on snigit.com (the day after my StumbleUpon campaign ended). You can see that the traffic from EntraCard had almost as many hits, and far more page views (note the orange box around the tall blue bar) than the traffic generated by StumbleUpon, and it was free!
Also, the extra page views (tall blue bars) during the 10 day’s I’ve been using Entracard on snigit.com are not a result of me posting or tweaking my site content - I haven’t posted to snigit in more than 2 weeks.
And another thing: a few days ago when I set up HiStats on my TYsTIPs blog I discovered that HiStats lets you exclude hits from your own computer. I could never get it to work with my snigit.com blogger account. But with TYsTIPS (a WordPress.org blog hosted on GoDaddy) I was able to easily exclude my PCs traffic from HiStats data from day 1. Therefor all the data on my hits to TYsTIPs is accurate and uninflated by my own activity.
So, to sum it up: purchasing a $25 dollar StumbleUpon campaign didn’t work for me. Does that mean that it won’t work for your site? Not necessarily. But I would recommend other traffic generating options like EntraCard before you shell out money for hits, be it with StumbleUpon or any other traffic generating site. You may be pleasently surprised with the free options out there. I know I was.
Now, EntraCard has it’s problems too. Some people just stop by (or return) to drop off their “card” and move on without looking at your site. However, you get a credit for every one of these people who use EntraCard in this way, so even if they aren’t actually looking at your sites content, at least they are helping you earn points to use for advertising. EntraCard isn’t perfect, but for me and for my sites, it has proved a better alternative to drive traffic than StumbleUpon.
If you’ve had success (or failure) with StumbleUpon, please share it with TYsTIPS.com by leaving a comment. You’re welcome to leave a link back to your site or to relevant posts.
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4 USER COMMENTED IN THIS POST
Hey Ty,
Here’s a post I did on getting the most out of Stumble. If you do it right you can get many, many more hits for free (I get about 5000 hits a month from Stumble without paying).
Here’s the link: http://www.tysblog.com/2008/03/23/get_the_most_out_of_stumbleupon/
Hope it helps!!!
Ty
Thanks Ty for the heads up on your post. I read through it (but I’ll need to read it again, it was chok-full of good advice). I also gave it a “thumbs up” via my StumbleUpon button, ironic isn’t it?
I think that if I had used your advice instead of signing up for a paid campaign, I would have had better results in the long run.
Readers, make sure to check out Ty’s post http://www.tysblog.com/2008/03/23/get_the_most_out_of_stumbleupon/ before you write StumbleUpon off entirely. Don’t take the approach I outlined above, it clearly isn’t effective!
The irony inherent here should be pointed out, I think: I just finished reading this entire article about how StumbleUpon users do little more than constantly hit the Stumble button without reading content, and yet I discovered this article via… StumbleUpon.
About 3/4 of the way through reading this article I decided to check out the site in question to see what it is that visitors were skipping over and apparently missing out on. If I stumbled on that site, I’d just continue hitting the stumble button, too.
Here are a few reasons why I’d do so:
a.) All that initially strikes me when I see the page is a lack of professionalism. This isn’t in itself reason for me to leave, but it is a big indicator towards the content. This point will be borne out more, within the others below.
b.) The header does a terrible job of describing what kind of content the blog contains. “Snap it, dig it, share it with snigit”? That helps me? Okay, so it has to do with photos. What kind of photos? Then I see the right side with categories, and it appears there isn’t any reason or rhyme to what gets posted. So I’ve stumbled on what looks like a website that just randomly posts photos. Are they vetted for quality? Do they centre on a specific locale? Absolutely no idea.
c.) It is using a /blog/ service for posting photos, and it is doing so with one post per photo. This again is a strike against professionalism, but weighs much more heavily in my decision to leave. Look at how much whitespace there is between every posted photo. In the entire upper fold of the page, you have included a single photo. A website whose purpose purports to be sharing “unique and interesting photos”, and the viewer’s first look is at a single photo, a jumble of categories, and a non-descriptive header.
I’m not trying to say that the blog layout always works against those trying to primarily publish photos, but others who do this manage it much better, in a number of ways. For example the extremely popular Cake Wrecks blog:
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/
What do you know when you hit the top fold of their page? All the photos are examples of bad cake design. How much whitespace is there in between photos? Very little, as they always include numerous photos per post, allowing a viewer to see a lot more at once. Furthermore, they’ve taken the time do actually do up a theme for their site. One relevant to their content, that lets the viewer know the blog wasn’t created in 5 minutes as an attempt at a quick cash grab.
d.) Volume of content. You have your categories clearly listed within the fold on the top right side of the page, but the site is just getting started (I’m assuming) and the explicit counts alongside each category only work against you. Seeing that an entire website that is supposed to revolve around the dispersion of unique photos only has 200 of them is a big reason to continue on.
I could continue, but will consider those enough. If you want stumblers to stay on your page, you need to actually make a page worth staying on. If the few hundred visitors you paid for were anything like me, they’ve learnt through numerous stumblings about some telltale signs that help demarcate good sites from bad. Snigit falls on the bad side for all of mine.
It doesn’t look like a website designed by someone who wants to share unique photos, it looks like a website designed by someone who wants to make money. These obviously aren’t mutually exclusive, but when there is an equal amount of vertical space dedicated towards ads and attempts at social spread as there is actual photos, it doesn’t look good. It looks cheap.
Here’s a nice site that actually does centre around showing people unique photos:
http://1x.com/
Within 1/4 of the amount of vertical space used on your site, they have over twice as many. And they’re not using a blog service or layout, because they understand that such a platform is not ideal when your sole purpose is essentially a giant image gallery with metadata.
Anyhow, to sum up, the initial question your article revolves around, “does StumbleUpon work [for paid advertising]” depends on whether what you’re advertising is worth anyone’s time. You act like the average Joe would be fine with your page, and surely there are those who will be, but you never seem to have determined whether the majority of Stumble users are “average Joe”s. When you’ve viewed thousands of pages, you’re going to get better at determining which ones contain worthwhile content.
Hi Andy,
First, let me take a moment to thank you for taking so much time to not only evaluate my other site, but also to provide me with so many suggestions of ways to improve it. And I’m being completely serious, I really do appreciate your constructive criticism.
To be honest, I agree with most of what you’ve said above. For me, Snigit was a huge learning experience. I wanted to create a site that would allow users to post their cool photos - especially iPhone users. Back when I created the site the iPhone was fairly new and I wanted to create a venue for smartphone users to post their interesting photos. Unlike Flickr, where users post 30 photos from their recent trip to Hawaii (of which 29+ are boring to the average viewer), I wanted a site where they could share that 1 picture from Hawaii that was truly amazing. That 1 picture that anyone would enjoy and appreciate.
However, Snigit was my first real attempt at creating a website, my first time working with CMS software like Blogger, my first time trying to monetize a site, etc. It was really a first in almost every way. And by all accounts, it was an experiment. A failed experiment. The site never lived up to the vision i had for it, mostly because I didn’t have enough experience in web design or photography to develop the site that I wanted. I’m also not a photography buff, so most of the time the elements that make a picture visually appealing elude me (and probably most other non-photography people).
So in reality, Snigit was a miserable failure. The traffic is dismal, the income is nearly non-existent (it doesn’t even cover the hosting fees), and nobody uploads pictures to it (including me). For the most part, it just sits there.
It was, however, a huge learning experience and an example of several things that don’t work.
This site (TysTips) was my next experiment. The purpose being mostly to document the process of setting up a blog and maintaining a record of all the problems (and solutions) that I ran into along the way.
If you’d allow me to go on a slight tangent for a minute I’ll explain my goal for this site.
A few years ago I had a Dell computer that died (HD read error). I googled the error codes that I was getting and found nothing. Either the problem was unique to my computer (which I found hard to believe) or nobody had taken the time to document the problem and the fix.
I worked on the computer for weeks before I finally figured out the problem - which turned out to be a simple fix. I documented the fix on a tech forum and literally thousands of people have visited that single post since then, and the post has had over a hundred replies (at last count), many of whom had actually replied to the post thanking me for documenting the steps I went through to fix my Dell - and thus allowing them to fix theirs. That single post has been truly rewarding. Here’s the link if you’re interested.
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic18329.html
My thought was that if that single post could help that many people, how much help could a blog like this one be? Potentially pretty helpful.
However, this site has also proven to be mostly unsuccessful (from a monetizing and traffic standpoint). But that’s ok, because virtually every week someone leaves a comment thanking me because this site has helped them. And for me, that’s rewarding enough.
And also, TysTips was yet another learning experience that helped me discover what works and what doesn’t. For one thing, I moved away from Blogger and transitioned to WordPress for this site because of Bloggers many limitations. And there are other examples of things that I didn’t incorporate into this site because I had found them to be unsuccessful with Snigit.
I took what I’ve learned so far from Snigit and TysTips and I’ve applied them to my next venture, ProjectsInMetal.com (PIM). By far, I’ve spent the largest amount of time on PIM. Interestingly, if you look at PIM you’ll probably see some of the suggestions you mentioned above already implemented into PIM.
If you have time, I’d be interested in your opinion of PIM. Metalworking might not be your expertise, but obviously you’ve got a good grasp of what a functional website should look like. Your thoughts on PIM would be greatly appreciated.
As far as Snigit is concerned, I’ve stopped working on it because I’ve lost interest. There are thousands of photo sites that do it better (some of which you mentioned above), and I don’t have the interest or energy to improve the site. Eventually I’ll take the site down, but I haven’t even had time to do that.
TysTips will stay up because it effectively serves its primary function (documenting some of the problems I had during the process of setting up a WordPress blog). And even though it doesn’t make any $, it helps a few people every week (maybe even every day). So to me this site is worth the effort.
However, most of my energy for the near future will be focused on developing and improving PIM, which is why I’d be interested in your opinions.
Thanks again for taking so much time to provide feedback on Snigit. Your analysis and opinions are greatly appreciated.
Tyler
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