StumbleUpon Ads was always an underrated service. It was not getting a whole lot of love from StumbleUpon, in terms of development, but it was quite a unique service for those looking for something beyond PPC. StumbleUpon has given the service a makeover and rebranded it as “Paid Discovery.” The new platform also offers different serving plans. This service used to offer views and basic reporting for 5 cents per visit. Users can now get advanced reporting and priority serving by paying more per view. (more…)

In case you have not noticed, StumbleUpon has been making some major changes to its interface for advertisers. The new changes were introduced a while back to make it much easier for StumbleuUpon advertisers to manage their campaigns. The service still allowed those who preferred the old interface to switch back. Not anymore. The changes seem to be final, and while we did not get the features we were expecting for, the new interface is a nice minor upgrade.

The new design focuses more on metrics and has a more sophisticated look and feel. Now you can easily find out your effective CPV for your campaigns and even figure out the free stumbles that you have gotten from the service.

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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.

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I have been using StumbleUpon ads for too long that I can remember. If you have been following the Web 2.0 services around, you have probably heard of StumbleUpon. It’s one of the best places to find the best content on the Internet and vote for your favorite stories. StumbleUpon makes it so easy to find and rank top stories to help others find stories that may be interesting to them. The more thumbs up you get, the more traffic you’ll receive.

Viral stories often get a lot of stumbles, and it snow balls from there. If your story gets a lot of votes, you are going to get a boost in traffic that will last for more than just a couple of hours or a couple of days. That’s just the nature of this community and why it’s one of my favorites.

Sometimes it’s tough to compete with stories that have gotten hundreds of stumbles already. Besides, not everybody knows how to work the community to get more stumbles for stories. That’s where StumbleUpon Ads come in. StumbleUpon Ads is an innovative service that lets you advertise your website in front of StumbleUpon community and get the votes you need to go viral. The service is unlike anything else on the market. You are not paying per click or per keyword. Instead, you pay per each view. So your site is going to be viewed as long as your account’s balance is more than zero. Each view only costs $0.05, so it’s very cheap if you think about it.

StumbleUpon Advertising does come with a few options to help you target your audience. You can choose how many times you want your page to be shown each day. You can also choose the location, gender, and age of your ideal audience to make sure you get targeted traffic.

The service has a lot of potential. It’d be great if StumbleUpon allowed dayparting. It would also be nice to have the chance to schedule or stop campaigns at a particular date. These are options that are available on more sophisticated services such as Adwords and Facebook Ads. Even as it is, it’s a wonderful way to get traffic to any website and go viral. With StumbleUpon, those thumbs ups that you get really count. So after you have collected enough thumbs up, you can turn your campaign off and still get traffic to your site from the community. The service has a lot of potential and could be even better if advertisers are provided with more control as not all views are equally beneficial to advertisers. At the same time, you only pay $0.05 per view, so you don’t have too much to complain.

You have probably heard the concept of red oceans before. In case, you haven’t heard of it, a red ocean is a market that is highly competitive and has a set of defined boundaries. Basically, the competitors try to outdo each other by grabbing more market-share in these defined areas. I believe, the Adwords game has become a red ocean strategy, and that is probably why folks are using other sources such as Facebook social ads to avoid paying a fortune for traffic.

Facebook social ads, Stumbleupon, and even LinkedIn ads are all great areas to explore. But folks who are going to these markets thinking that they are going to get a high conversion rate are highly mistaken. I am all for adopting a blue ocean strategy, but throwing money at social media hoping to get Adwords results is not a good strategy. The truth is, the audience is very different between these channels, and as such the conversion rate will be different as well.

I am not claiming that spending money in the social media is a total waste of time. You can get nice traffic from Facebook and Stumbleupon, but converting that traffic will be difficult. And you can say the same thing about Digg traffic. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t hurt to spend some money in the social media, but don’t go around throwing your Adwords budget at Facebook as that would only lead to heartbreak.

You have probably tried the StumbleUpon service by now. It’s a Web 2.0 service that allows you to stumble upon interesting sites. It’s a very addictive service and extremely useful in finding good authority sites. But did you know that you can advertise on StumbleUpon? In essence, StumbleUpon allows you to take advantage of their pay per view system to get visitors to your site through their service.

Unlike Google Adwords, StumbleUpon allows you to pay per visit and not per click per se. So your site will load and the visitor will have a glimpse before you are charged the whole $0.05 for it. Not only that, StumbleUpon doesn’t work with keywords but categories. So the traffic is targeted but not by keyword.

The downside to StumbleUpon is that the traffic is not highly convertible. The traffic that you get on StumbleUpon is more interested in doing research in surfing and less in buying. You can obviously optimize your landing pages to get higher conversions with StumbleUpon but the conversion will never reach the Adwords level.

So is the pay per view model here to stay? I think so. The PPV model is suitable for businesses that want to get eyeballs to their sites and not necessarily convert them. Besides there is no click fraud to deal with and the traffic can be cheap. I am sure at some point StumbleUpon will increase the cost per visit and make this system more complex but right now you would be out of your mind not to try StumbleUpon and their PPV model.