StumbleUpon PPC advertising - the results are in

Some of you may remember that, back in March, I signed up with StumbleUpon's paid advertising to test whether or not it was a cost effective form of pay-per-click marketing.

As I noted in a recent comment on the PropertyOwl community website, it's my opinion that PPC advertising is one of the three most underused marketing tools that estate agents have access to (along with email newsletters and blogging).

Well, the results are in..

Our $50 campaign ran for 38 days from the 31st March to the 7th May, costing 5 cents for each of 1,000 visitors.

To begin with, we only advertised the PropertyADD website and the results did not make pretty reading, with an astronomical 98.44% bounce rate.

Figuring that blatantly paid stumbles would have significantly less of an impact on the audience, I then switched to advertising The Modern Estate Agent.

Serving up ads for (what I hope is) useful blog content fared a little better, the bounce rate dropping to a still eye-watering 84.35%.

My hope that votes from the paid traffic would increase the number of free visitors was also left unfounded. Just 7 free visits were reported by the StumbleUpon management tool during the same period. What's more, the further 25 stumbled visits to this blog since the campaign ended are barely any different to the numbers seen beforehand.

Of equal concern is the fact that Google Analytics captured only 735 of the supposed 1,007 visitors.

So, what are the conclusions of this experiment?

• Targetting visitors based on a location of 'UK' is near useless for the majority of estate agents.
• ''Real Estate' is simply not a tight enough definition of a topic in our market.
• Of the 34,000 stumblers that are alledgedly subscribed to the 'Real Estate' topic, the vast majority are unlikely to be in the UK. The potential audience is just too small to be of any interest.
• The 'stumbling' model encourages visitors to view a single page and then stumble off elsewhere.
• Because there is very little focus or control over what type of sites you stumble onto, as a visitor, you are more likely to be looking for inspiration than anything else (as I've mentioned before when discussing how to combat writer's block).

In summary, StumbleUpon is best viewed as a social bookmarking website. StumbleUpon ads have the potential to be useful with a viral marketing campaign that really captures the public imagination, particularly if you manage to get a page bookmarked by a stumbler with some clout. But they're not any use for typical business marketing campaigns and certainly not a competitor for Google AdWords.