May
28
stumbleupon ads is not quite good cpv advertising
I regularly like to see what the competition is doing in the PPV space and while doing that this past week I ran into stumbleupon ads touting a CPV model. I was somewhat interested to see if they made a pop engine since I know most of the regular players in the space.
As I researched more it turns out that stumbleupon is selling on a CPV pricing model and charging a minimum 5 cent CPV…that’s $50 CPM!!! Needless to say, with that kind of pricing I was expecting a great product, boy was I mistaken.
The way it works is that people with the stumblupon toolbar/plugin surf around the Internet and thumbs up or thumbs down any given website they are on. This essentially creates a profile for stumbleupon to target against. Once users have “stumbledupon” enough sites it seems like they bucket the users into given interests and in turn sell those as demographics to target for advertisers. When the user with the stumbleupon toolbar/plugin click the “stumble!” button they are taken to a random advertisers site based on their personal interest.
I decided to give it a try just to see what $50CPM could yield my blog…I would have been better off burning the $20. $20 is a small test, but I wanted to see what the initial results would yield. 400 targeted impressions should give me decent insight into the quality of the traffic.
The results were 8 people out of 400 impressions “liking” my website and an average duration on site of 14 seconds. Not good by any means and leads me to believe that people aren’t really that interested when they stumble. I was targeted to the “SEO” section, so it was targeted, but I guess I was hoping for more considering the $50CPM.
A few specific things I don’t like which I think can be attributed to this being a new business for them are:
- No hourly caps – I was able to set a cap, but only on a daily basis, so I did $5 a day probably in the first few minutes of the day. Broken down hourly would allow a better flow of traffic with the natural patterns of internet traffic throughout the day.
- Confusing interface – While the layout is visually nice, the actual functionality leaves much to be desired. I found myself clicking all around to find something as simple as campaign details…I am still clicking.
- Unclear definitions – Now this could be due to not being a hardcore stumbleupon user, but I have no clue what the score means. I somehow have a 89% score, but there is no defintion as to what that even means. When you click on the 89% it takes you to the stumblupon homepage for your domain. Even when I got there I couldn’t figure out where the 89% was derived from.
- Different budgets – There is a campaign budget and an account budget. While I think the ability to control spend is always good, this should be handled only on the campaign level. An advertiser should be smart enough to manage their spends on a campaign level, so this was just a bit confusing.
Conclusion: All in all, I think stumbleupon has a good start to something that could do well, but I think the price point of $50CPM is a bit high given the unpolished interface and definitions. At this point I would still stick to other CPV networks for promtion for the mere fact that they are cheaper, have better interfaces, and are more established.
