StumbleUpon is one of the most underrated advertising networks on the market. It operates very differently from Google and Microsoft. Unlike pay per click or CPM model, StumbleUpon is a pay per view model. So you’ll only spend money when your page is viewed by StumbleUpon visitors. That’s not all though. You can get free traffic from StumbleUpon if people who have visited your landing page give you enough thumbs up. That means StumbleUpon can be a great traffic driver if you have a content heavy portal. It can also help lower down your conversion rates as the cost of each view is only 5 cents. The only knock against StumbleUpon ads is the fact that it doesn’t get too much love from SU. The service could be much more sophisticated and allow for more flexibility, but that hasn’t happened so far. The service is getting a upgrade in look and feel as StumbleUpon is testing StumbleUpon Ads beta. It’s designed to help you get a better feel for your StumbleUpon campaigns and get more out of it.

The new StumbleUpon Ads interface is more sleek and makes it much easier to find out how many free and paid clicks you are getting per campaign. You can also easily find out the effective cost per visitor per campaign. The new system also suggests the categories that you can list your campaigns under to get more traffic to your website and get more bang out of each buck spent.

There is no guarantee how much success you can have with StumbleUpon. In fact, even mastering the art of using StumbleUpon ads can take a bit of time. But your goal should be to get as many thumbs ups as possible. The more that happens, the better chance you have of getting free traffic from SU. That means you can potentially bring your costs down even further, but you need to have the right content to get the job done.