StumbleUpon was picked up by eBay for S$75 million in May. It’s no surprise considering the hype about social media these days, especially after the famous buy-outs of Myspace, Youtube and Del.icio.us. StumbleUpon is basically a community platform that lets you easily “discover and share great websites”. To participate, you simply install the toolbar above, click on thumbs up or down when you discover a site and enter a review. A site with favourable ratings can expect a stream of traffic from their 2.3 million-strong members. It’s no wonder that with that many members, it would be a natural target for marketers and spammers. Just how much traffic can you expect from StumbleUpon? Lets find out. I took a blog post from Ping.sg that I thought would be popular, massaged the content a bit and re-posted it on a relatively new blog on June 15th. I gave it a “thumbs-up” on StumbleUpon and here’s what happened: Looking at the numbers from the previous months, it’s not difficult to estimate how much traffic StumbleUpon sent - and that’s only from June 15th to 30th. An interesting observation is that their members are very focused, i.e. they came for that article and nothing else. The CTR for my Google Ads was abnormally low at around 0.5% so while the traffic numbers are good, they won’t convert easily. This was what I experienced with Digg traffic too. Hence, marketers should be aware about the hype with social media marketing because based on what I’ve seen so far, it maybe a good method to create brand exposure but it’s poor at generating sales leads.
I agree on that, Larry =)
I have noticed that traffic from Social Bookmarking sites (Stumbleupon and Digg etc) does not perform well for PPC conversion. I personally do not click on ads during my stumbling activity as well.
Comment by KC TAN — July 10, 2007 @ 10:23 pm