Ask HN: Have you used StumbleUpon to market?

My site, Correlated (http://www.correlated.org) has gotten >100K hits from StumbleUpon (all organic), and in my experience, it's crappy traffic.

I've looked at my site stats, and only a tiny fraction of those hits -- less than 1 percent -- results in any sort of action on the site.

Compared with traffic from practically every other referrer, that's markedly less engagement.

There are some sites, for instances, whose referral traffic results in engagement in up to 50 percent of cases, and those aren't all necessarily highly targeted audiences.

What can I infer from this?

My guess is that a lot of this StumbleUpon traffic is coming from people who are only passively using the service, as opposed to actively using it.

I would describe an active user of the service as someone who says, "Hey, I'm bored. I'll go to StumbleUpon and look for some interesting websites."

I would describe a passive user of the service as someone who, say, has it set as their homepage, so it opens up whenever they open their browser, whether or not they're actually in the mood to check out new websites.

Whatever the reason, StumbleUpon referrals are traffic that I have largely written off.

Our site, NoSweaters (http://nosweaters.com) started marketing on Stumbleupon's lowest click rate ($0.05/click) right after the Black Friday weekend. The start was slow. We garnered essentially the clicks we paid for and nothing more. Further, there were a lot of hiccups in the process, as we waited for approval for the campaign, which seemed to take much, much longer than other venues (read: Adwords).

Our target market, we decided, was women aged 15-30. From our exhaustive studies (aka, friends and family cajoling) we gathered they were the most enthusiastic users. We set up a custom front page for Stumble users to introduce them to the site.

We did this for Monday, Nov. 28th, Tues. the 29th and on Wednesday, we got caught up again in an approval issue, yelled at SU on Twitter, and all of a sudden we got blasted with organic traffic late Wednesday night (the 30th). Our daily visits went from 100 paid to ~20k unpaid hits a day for a solid week. After that, the traffic dropped off like a stone.

In that time, however, our bounce rate was only about 48%. We believe several factors account for this:

1) The main page was little more than an enticement with easy click through to the meat of the site.

2) The site was very appropriate for the time of year (a gift help site in the holiday buying months)

3) Our target happened to be spot on (we think).

We were also running a contest at the time to help drum up users and usage. Top users would receive Amazon gift cards.

All of these efforts yielded over 300 new users and more than 2,500 new "questions" (our site is a Q&A site for gift ideas; "asking a question" currently requires nothing but an email address).

From a purely return-on-investment perspective, we can say we were quite happy with the results we got from Stumbleupon. We're definitely suspicious of their methods of how they deliver organic vs. paid traffic (seems they've got their hands on spigots). We paid about $40 for the equivalent of 160K visits, and we got a ton of new content, and some very focused and dedicated users.

We've got a ton of test and usage data that we can now mine through to figure out what our next changes should be. We have very active involved, non-friend-or-family users that have given us very valuable feedback on what they want to see from the site. All in all, it's a great utility for a site trying to build itself, but I question its value for an established site (vs. blog posts or other SEO efforts).

If you have any questions about our experience, please don't hesitate to chuck them my way.

When I was still working on it, my site ThatHigh.com would consistently get more than 100k visitors per month from SU. That started out from paid traffic, but since the site got good ratings on SU the organic traffic continued.

However, I only think it worked because of the site's niche (cough). If you have a site that needs high quality traffic, it might not work very well.

The only way to make Stumbleupon profitable is to put a high-paying clickthrough ad underneath the Stumble button.

It seems to me that once you pay for traffic on Stumbleupon, they turn off your organic traffic, since by paying for traffic you've proven yourself to be a rube.

Not used the paid option (didn't know there was one), but tried using it for a few (non-tech) small businesses about 2 years ago. Lots of traffic, no conversions, high bounce rate.

The demographic appears to be "bored people looking for free stimulation".

I've spent about $50 on stumble upon for my site, at $0.05 a click. As others have said it's very poor quality traffic. I don't sell anything on the site so conversions is not meaningful, but I did not get any lasting traffic from the campaign. Because my site is about beer, it was nice that I could target very specifically (males, 21-35 in california). One thing i noticed is that after you run a paid campaign, you're more likely to get organic stumble upon traffic - I've probably gotten twice the amount organically then I've paid for.

Stumbleupon clicks convert at near zero rates. The value, if there is one, is in promoting linkbait. If you can get a genuinely interesting piece of content in front of enough people to attract some links, Stumble can be worth it. But to use it like you would AdWords (i.e. to directly generate sales/leads) is like burning money, only less fun - the CPA is astronomical.

I used it some years ago to bring traffic to trendgal.com and I was disappointed for the quality of the traffic even if it was targeted to our niche. There was a lot of visits but little stickiness. I guess it is based on the web surfer pattern and the tacit promise that maybe there is a cooler site on the next click.

That has been my experience as well... very few conversions but... I'm wrestling with the idea that it is similar to impressions of an ad ... maybe a 'bad' ad?