StumbleUpon Ads: Take Your Money & Run?
StumbleUpon July 21st, 2008
I’ve used SU advertising once before but wanted to do a revisit and take a second look at how effective…or not this service really is. At just five cents per page view it seems like a pretty good deal but I’ve noticed some discrepancies in my analytics that could make me think twice about advertising again.
I started a campaign with $100 and budgeted that for $10 per day. This equals 200 page views per day. So every day the campaign is running I should see 200 page views in my analytics right? Well, not quite. As of 4:00PM Friday SU was reporting 200 page views but my analytics (Mint) was reporting 156 and Google analytics reported 163. Today being the fourth day of this campaign, SU is reporting 801 page views, Mint is reporting 690, and GA is reporting 631.
A friend suggested that this discrepancy might be due to fast clicking where people are hammering the SU button so it’s recorded as a page view on SU’s end but not within analytics.
Has anyone else encountered this issue? I’d love to hear if others have noticed this.
July 21st, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I ran a campaign a few months ago and noticed the same thing.
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:52 am
A friend suggested that this discrepancy might be due to fast clicking where people are hammering the SU button so it’s recorded as a page view on SU’s end but not within analytics.
Exactly my first thoughts, especially if analytics tracking is at the bottom of the page
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:29 am
It is down to a number of things,
1) Stumbleupon counts a visit when it places a site for a person to view in their queue.
2)Your Analytics counts only when a useragent that has javascript enabled turns up on your account.
This means if someone has your site in their queue but doesn’t actually visit, clicking to fast, closing their session. Then Stumbleupon has still counted it but they didn’t actually get there. Meanwhile your analytics program maybe missing 5% of visits because they have chosen to block tracking or disabled javascript at all. The combination means that you can see wild discrepancies between what SU thought it has sent and what you see, for SU to fix this they would need to shut of precaching on su toolbar and make more calls to the toolbar which would slow the process down for their users something that would have a negative effect on all stumblers
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:36 am
Hey Brendan,
I’d be curious to see what WP stats are showing for the same time period as well.
July 22nd, 2008 at 11:24 am
@All First let me say it’s great to see people I know and respect comment here. @Tim: Brilliant explanation which makes total sense. I would think it would do SU well to at least mention this (in plain sight) to it’s paying advertisers.@Brian: I don’t use WP’s stats feature so I don’t have any data to share from this.
November 29th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
I ran a test campaign..very small, but noticed the bounce rate in google analytics was ridiculous. Almost seems as if StumbleUpon is a glorified traffic exchange with a dash of web 2.0 & social networking, at least thats my initial impression from the bounce rate I was getting.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some things I like about Stumbleupon… just not too sure if I’ll advertise on it again. I’d probably test a different niche or 2 before I decided to personally write them off as a viable advertising channel for the results I was trying to achieve.