Like Facebook and Twitter ads, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is a social media advertising platform for publishers and other businesses. However, most online marketers don’t have much experience with StumbleUpon itself, despite what they may think, and this ignorance often leads to angry users and poor campaigns. These 3 simple tips should assist you in making your next StumbleUpon advertising campaign a success.
Always Select Specific Interests
When setting up your campaign, one of the first things StumbleUpon asks is if you’d prefer “Precise Targeting” of interests (Cars, Marketing, Travel, all hand-picked by you) or if you would instead prefer targeting “Interest Bundles,” pre-selected interest clusters that have very little crossover in many cases. For example, “Adrenaline Junkies,” which is home to seemingly unrelated topics like “Rodeo” and “Drugs.” That GoPro skateboarding video your client wants you to share seems like a natural fit based on the “Adrenaline Junkies” title, but it’s not … unless you want to waste money serving the video to people interested in “Rodeo,” “Drugs,” and “Poker.” You would be much better off individually selecting the “Skateboarding” interest. For those of you unfamiliar with the 200+ “interests” on StumbleUpon, you can find a full list here: StumbleUpon’s Topics/Categories/Interests.
Select the Most-Related Interest First
Make sure the first “interest” (category) you select is the most relative. The reason for this is simple: The first interest you select is the one StumbleUpon categorizes your link by. For example, let’s say your client runs a pregnancy blog and does a post on morning sickness prevention. An article on that topic could fit into several of StumbleUpon’s pre-set interest selections. It could fall under “Pregnancy/Birth,” “Kids,” “Parenting,” “Women,” and “Health.” However, “Pregnancy/Birth” is the most related interest and should therefore be selected first. This will ensure proper categorization of the link by StumbleUpon, as seen in the screenshot below.
Targeting Devices: Desktop Only
When selecting the types of devices your ad should be served to, I almost always target desktop computers only. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that some clients don’t have mobile-optimized websites (I know, get with the program, right?) and the other is that most of StumbleUpon’s power users are desktop browsers. Those viewing on mobile are usually more casual in their use of StumbleUpon and therefore have smaller networks and are less likely to reshare.
While these tips aren’t perfect for every StumbleUpon Ads campaign, I stick to these three tips over 90% of the time. It seems to be effective, our estimated cost per pageview is a whopping 6 cents. What does a targeted pageview on Facebook and Twitter run you these days?
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