Social Media Optimization with StumbleUpon

Social media optimizers have long touted StumbleUpon’s usefulness in driving new direct traffic to your site. A number of social media optimization experiments have demonstrated StumbleUpon’s ability to generate a significantly larger amount of traffic than other social media sites.

Last June, Social Media Optimization performed an experiment to see What Social Media Sites Send Traffic.

They deliberately picked 2 blogs that were unknown, with no existing backlinks to them: The Story of Tea, and Shopping for Tents.

The number of visitors from each social media site for both posts combined were:

* Stumbleupon.com – 512 visits
* Reddit.com – 65 visits
* Digg.com – 12 visits
* Fark – 8 visits
* Indianpad.com – 7 visits
* Google Referral – visits
* Technorati.com – 3 visits
* Netscape.com -3 visits
* Myweb2.search.yahoo.com – 2 visits
* Newsvine – 1 referral

Interestingly, StumbleUpon sent 5 times more traffic than all of the other social media sites combined.

Furthermore, they discovered that StumbleUpon delivered the best quality traffic. While Digg and Fark visitors left the site immediately after reading the blog post, 67% of StumbleUpon visitors went past the landing page and visited at least one other page on the sites.

In January, SEOmoz released a piece of linkbait for a site called Drivl, called Every Single Mythbusters Myth EVER on One Page. In a period of 5 days, StumbleUpon delivered over 13,000 visitors.

Does StumbleUpon Traffic Convert?

Let’s pause and think about this one.

StumbleUpon is a social discovery site – with a hidden ad network. Web publishers can buy placements from StumbleUpon that guarantee a certain number of page views from StumbleUpon users per day. The cost is a minimum of $0.05 per visitor.

One one hand, while advertisers can reach a highly targeted audience, user interest areas are still fairly broad categories, like “ecology” or “Native American”. Furthermore, when users “stumble” they are in “discovery” mode, not “shopping mode”. So it is not surprising that ads displaying a product (relating to a broad interest area) that the user was not specifically searching for would convert terribly.

In February, SEOmoz published statistics on their Conversion Rate Tracking For Signups, which showed referrals from various sources, StumbleUpon included. For SEOmoz, “conversion” was registering on their blog for free.

StumbleUpon sent 55,599 visitors, but only 22 people signed up – the 0.03% conversion rate being the worst of the bunch.

Suppose SEOmoz paid $0.05 per impression for StumbleUpon’s paid inclusion program. That would have amounted to nearly $2800 for only 22 conversions, a whopping $125 cost per acquisition (CPA).

Conclusions?

1. If you have good, linkable content, expect StumbleUpon to send you a few visitors.
2. If you have amazing content, expect overwhelming response.
3. When creating linkbait, take into account that page’s “Stumbleability”.
4. Use StumbleUpon for brand awareness, and think twice about paying for it.

[tags]stumbleupon, smo, social media optimization, seomoz, lorna li[/tags]

Related posts:

1. StumbleUpon New Ways to Drive Traffic To Your Site
2. 6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan
3. eBay’s $75M Purchase of StumbleUpon is “Not a Drug Induced Hallucination”
4. Buzz Marketing Through Social Media – What this Means for Search Engine Marketers
5. What Is a Social Media News Release?

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