iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant

Source:Hitwise

Reading this post from wellmedicated.com on how he generated 100,000 page views for not a lot of cash ($25) via Stumbleupon got me thinking about my advertising experience with this less well known service.

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking service with more than two million registered users. Many bloggers use it to drive organic traffic to their blog (see the link at the botton of this post?), but did you know stumbleupon also offers advertising?

StumbleUponAds allows you to submit a page on your blog to be shown to StumbleUpon users as they go Stumbling. The cost is $0.05 per impression so for $5 you can have 100 SU users see your page.

This makes StumbleUpon relatively cheap, and you don’t need to create an ad, just a page to send people to. You can then target your page to be shown to different categories as well as specific demographics (age, location and gender). Its not uncommon for additional stumbling to happen, and if that happens you’ll end up with more impressions than you paid for.

Choose a post that relates closely to the category and demographic of StumbleUpon users that you are targeting and that you could see becoming viral.

The key with StumbleUpon is not to spend all you budget on a campaign straight away. Get your landing page/post ready and then set a small budget to see what results you get.

Once this is spent analyse how many people voted the post up and down. If there were few ups then edit the post, and run another small campaign to see what impact the changes have. Continue to do this until you have a page that is consistently getting voted up and then increase your budget. Bear in mind that you might only need to get a relatively small number of up votes before Stumbleupon starts sending you organic traffic – keep an eye on it and be ready to pause your campaign once this starts to happen.

The official Google Blog brings the news that Google is digitising old newspapers, to create a huge, searchable archive of print. Cool Stuff.

I’ve blogged before about google eye tracking studies, which are a great help in understanding site usabilty and also user responses to search engine results.

Here’s another great piece of research from think eyetracking

The study compares two sets of results – one from 2005, and one from 2008:

As seen in the heatmap above, fixations are studded around the top 5 results and the majority of clicks are upon the top 3 results (discounting the sponsored link). The sponsored link was actually not well attended to due to the fact that searchers are now familiar with advertiser placement within Google. The 2008 heatmap supports the recent trend observed by Cornell University (Their study found that the top 3 Google results get 79% of all clicks) and by AOL (Findings were that 63% of clicks were concentrated upon the top three search results).

Furthermore when asked afterwards what they would normally do when they couldn’t find their desired search result on the first page of Google, 87% respondents replied that they would modify the search terms or refine the search by category. 97% of people tested answered that Google was the search engine they most commonly used and out of those people, 87% stated they wouldn’t bother using anything else.

Personally I think ths has a lot to do with users getting used to finding then getting to the information they need from Google.

And it shows (again) that you need to rank high to get seen…

Google is 10 years old today. Wow. Time really does fly….

Google reigns as world’s most powerful 10-year-old.

EDIT: Oh apparently Google doesn’t think its ten. Yet. Thought it was a bit quiet.