Does StumbleUpon actually Work? A look at my first SU Campaign.

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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