About two weeks ago I decided to hold a little contest with myself to test out Stumbleupon Paid Discovery Versus Facebook Paid Ads.
I have used both extensively in the past for various projects, but never for driving traffic to a blog.
I will be the first to admit that this case study has serious holes (no opt-in bait, crazy low spend, no real sales funnel in place etc.) but it was fun to run a quick test to see what I could expect from these two sources in the future.
My Facebook Results
I created a brand new author page and decided to use Sponsored Stories to drive some “likes” to the fan page as well as traffic to this blog.
Here are my results:
Total Spend: $6.07
Total New Likes: 12
Total Cost Per Like: $0.51
Total Clicks To Blog: 11
Total Cost Per Click: $0.56
Here are the ads that I ran:
Ad 1
Ad 2
Here is the Google analytics data (slightly skewed because I didn’t differentiate this traffic from all Facebook traffic for that day, but I think it reflects prior data I have received from running FB ads so I am ok with it):
My StumbleUpon Results
I chose two articles to run StumbleUpon ads to. Here were the results:
Total Spent: $21
Total Stumbles (Visits): 160
Cost Per Visitor: $0.13
Here are the ads I ran:
Ad 1
Ad 2
Here is the Google analytics data:
What Worked
In terms of driving traffic for the cost, I am happy with both results.
The StumbleUpon traffic was much cheaper, but stayed on the site for less than 30 seconds. Because I write longer posts, I know for a fact that a 30 second visit means that they didn’t read the entire thing.
That being said, I was surprised to see how many “Free” stumbles I received. That means that people were clicking the “Stumble” button and their friends were “Stumbling” it as well.
The Facebook traffic really liked the content (staying for an average of 4:28 seconds) and they were even semi-engaged within the Facebook author fanpage I created (commenting, liking the post etc.).
Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, both sources of traffic were extremely inexpensive. Facebook was obviously more targeted, but even StumbleUpon offers a measure of targeting in their Paid Discovery program.
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What I Will Do Differently Next Time
I ran paid traffic without having a full blown sales funnel in place (c’mon man… that is like IM 101 stuff… what were you thinking?). I didn’t even have a half-decent ebook to giveaway to build my email list. Before I run paid ads again I am going to throw up all the important sales funnel stuff that I need to get people on my mailing list.
I wish I could figure out how to track social signals like “likes” and “Tweets” from the StumbleUpon dashboard. In other words, what I want to know is “How many StumbleUpon visits also “liked” the page and/or Tweeted it?” That knowledge would really allow me to judge more accurately the worth of a StumbleUpon paid visit. If Stumble users share their content outside of StumbleUpon, then I don’t care how long they stay on my site, they would be a very cheap army of social sharers if that is the case.
I really need to work on learning how to write “viral” posts instead of just posts that I “feel” like writing. As of right now I am writing whatever comes to mind and not doing too much planning regarding the content. Before I throw more money at running ads I need to come up with some social share “bait” and then run traffic to that instead. As you may have noticed in both instances the “How To Be A Prolific Writer” post outperformed the “Kindle Case Study” posts regardless of the ad platform. I will have to break down the content to figure out why that it is, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.
Takeaway
I think for now I am going to stick with FB ads, if for no other reason than because I can build my fanpage at the same time that I am driving traffic – and I like doing two things at once.
As soon as I figure out how to write better posts (gonna tuck into some training this week) I will certainly ad StumbleUpon to the mix as I see a lot of potential for getting my content spread around the web for cheap.