Get Started with Paid Discovery

StumbleUpon Paid Discovery delivers the right traffic directly to your site or content: no clicking through ads or links.

100% Engagement, 100% of the time.

Learn More

Syndicate

Paid Discovery Blog

Mother’s Day: She Deserves Great Content

Thursday, May 10th, 2012

With Mother’s Day fast approaching, advertisers have been using Paid Discovery as a way to reach users looking to make mom’s special day as exciting as can be. Whether it be food recipes or gift ideas, we’ve seen a lot of great content intended to help ensure all the moms of the world are happy this Sunday.

Hopefully you’ve already begun preparing, but if you haven’t (shame on you), try stumbling for ideas and chances are you’ll see a great Mother’s Day-related sponsored stumble.

Remember where you came from and make this Sunday memorable -- she deserves it!


Here’s a look at some of our favorite Mother’s Day Paid Discovery campaigns (in no particular order):

10 Recipes to Spoil Mom This Mother’s Day: These delicious recipes are the perfect way to pay mom back for all the years of her great cooking.

How to Have the Best Mother’s Day Ever: This appropriately-titled guide from iVillage showcases all of their amazing Mother’s Day content, from gift ideas to thoughtful articles.

DIY Mother’s Day Gifts: For the more crafty folks out there, here’s a selection of numerous DIY ideas to give your gift that extra bit of creativity.

5 Thrifty Gift Ideas for Mother’s Day: If you’re low on cash but still want to show your love, worry not because Bankrate has provided some memorable and unique gift ideas.

Gift Ideas for Mom: Featuring a diverse selection of gift baskets and goodies, ArtTownGifts has you covered with these great gifts.

Mother’s Day Central: If you’re just not sure where to start, head to Mothers Day Central and you’ll find a repository for everything mom-related.

Mother’s Day Cards from Etsy: Check out this collection of cool Mother’s Day cards, which have a more artsy style compared to typical run-of-the-mill cards.

Whether it’s a holiday or a cultural event, Paid Discovery is perfect for seeding your timely content to an eager user base in the mindset of discovery.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can reach us at advertisers@stumbleupon.com or by tweeting us @PaidDiscovery, and we’d be happy to help.

Stumble On,

Cyrus
Ads & Content Manager

Case Study: Hatchedlt Books New Users with StumbleUpon

Tuesday, May 8th, 2012

Mom-focused Online Calendar Drives 60% of Signups Using Paid Discovery.

According to Salary.com the job of family CEO should pay $134,121 per year. It is an executive-level position that entails managing multiple schedules within tight budgetary constraints, while staying focused on the emotional and physical needs of others. This is the driving force behind newest mom-driven product online: HatchedIt.

Launched in 2011, HatchedIt was built to help busy moms coordinate their family schedules. Like every new product that enters a market, the team behind HatchedIt, Kirsten Bischoff and Megan Brown needed to find a way to spread the word of their newest product. Turning to press and online channels, the duo found that StumbleUpon Paid Discovery could serve as a promising outlet for getting busy moms to discover a new tool to make their lives easier.

HatchedIt used their content page to drive results


StumbleUpon, Google and Facebook composed the marketing budget for the HatchedIt team. During the window from March 8-25, they allocated equally between StumbleUpon and Google, and half of the budget of each to Facebook. With each service, the team looked to target women who were 30+, seeking to hit the sweet spot with moms.

“As both an advertiser and a user of StumbleUpon, I believe that the mindset is what makes the difference in leveraging the StumbleUpon advertising platform,” says HatchedIt founding partner Kirsten Bischoff.

By the end of the 25th, StumbleUpon had driven nearly twice as many conversions as the other two platforms combined. The results contributed from both paid traffic, as well as the resulting viral lift from StumbleUpon’s organic traffic.

“I attribute much of our success with this platform to the fact that StumbleUpon’s users are reaching our site while in ‘discovery mode,’” continues Bischoff, “We are not only targeting people who are hoping to find new sites – but even better for us, people who are hoping to find new sites that are focused on family and parenting.”

StumbleUpon Drove Nearly ⅔ of all sign ups from the campaign


We love working with teams like HatchedIt here at Paid Discovery and look forward to hearing about more success! If you have a story that you would like to share, please let us know by emailing us advertisers@stumbleupon.com or tweeting us @PaidDiscovery.

Stumble On!

Jack Krawczyk
Senior Product Marketing Manager

Paid Discovery Tip of the Week 6

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

Whether you are new to Paid Discovery or just need a refresher course, we bring you weekly tips and tricks to help you better understand and manage your Paid Discovery campaigns.

This week…

Understanding the Account Dashboard

The Account Dashboard is your home screen in Paid Discovery, think of it as your mission control for all of your Paid Discovery activity.

Think of the Account Dashboard as your mission control.

1. Click the Create a New Campaign button to create a new campaign. The process is pretty     simple after that; submit an URL, choose how you would like to target your campaign and then     wait for our approval team to accept your ad.

2. The Traffic graphs are useful to see the number of stumbles (views), both free and paid, over a     certain amount of time. Simply select the dates, click Update and the graph will show you the     corresponding traffic information.

  • A paid stumble is an unique visitor to an advertiser’s page that they pay to receive. A free stumble is a free visit to your page as a result of viral content. Free traffic is always indicated in blue on the “Traffic” chart and paid corresponds with green.

3. The Account Overview section shows your total active and paused campaigns along with your      Effective Cost Per View (ECPV), the number that tells you how much you have paid per stumble     (the more free stumbles the lower your ECPV will be).

  • Lifetime Stats simply show you metrics over the course of your advertising history with Paid Discovery.

4. The Score graph shows you the thumbs up verses thumbs down ratio your campaigns have     received over a set amount of time (the dates you want to see can be changed above the Traffic     graph, step #2).

  • If your campaign was to receive 80 thumbs up and 20 thumbs down, your score for that campaign would be 80%. Ads perform pretty well on StumbleUpon, 75% of the time they are given a thumbs up.

5. The Key Metrics section shows you the number of paid and free stumbles and the average daily     spend over the time period you set above the Traffic graph.

6. The Account Info section shows the remaining funds in an account, how much has been spent     today, and the daily spending max. This section will update as your funds are spent.

Now that you know all there is to know about your Account Dashboard, you’re ready to launch your campaigns out into cyberspace!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can reach us at advertisers@stumbleupon.com or by tweeting us @PaidDiscovery, and we’d be happy to help.

Stumble On,

Eric
Ads & Content Coordinator

Array

A Look Inside StumbleUpon Paid Discovery

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

You are familiar with Paid Discovery, but I bet you didn’t know that Paid Discovery delivered 17,077,156,146 seconds of brand engagement in 2011 (and growing each year).

Rest assured, there is a lot more where that came from. Check out the infographic below for a look inside StumbleUpon Paid Discovery:


As always, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can reach us at advertisers@stumbleupon.com or by tweeting us @PaidDiscovery, and we’d be happy to help.

Stumble On,

Rishvika
Marketing Associate

The Evolution of Native Advertising

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

We here at StumbleUpon are big believers that advertising should enhance a consumer’s experience, rather than interrupt it. Earlier today, we released a new opinion piece for iMedia documenting the nature of native advertising and how it is evolving with social media.

Native advertising is defined as an advertising unit designed to integrate seamlessly with a user’s consumption experience. This is how we think about Paid Discovery: a natural integration into a user’s Stumbling endeavors. By capturing this mindset, our brand partners are aligning the content with which they tell their stories with potential customers who are willing to hear them out, rather than experience an interruption in the native use of the service.

Along with other advertising platforms in the social space, we are very excited for the opportunities that marketers have to build their audiences and distribute high quality content.

Please give a read to the thoughts we’ve laid forth. We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!

Read on iMedia >



Stumble On!

Jack Krawczyk
Senior Product Marketing Manager

Paid Discovery Tip of the Week 5

Tuesday, April 24th, 2012

Whether you are new to Paid Discovery or just need a refresher course, we bring you weekly tips and tricks to help you better understand and manage your Paid Discovery campaigns.

This week…

Auto and Manual Targeting

When creating a campaign, every advertiser starts from the same place. But after entering your URL and moving to step 2 of the campaign creation process, you are offered the important choice of Auto or Manual targeting. To help advertisers get acquainted with what each option consists of, I’ll outline their features here

Auto-Targeting

With auto-targeting, you send your campaign along to our approval team who choose the interests based on your content. Advertisers looking for a quicker and more flexible campaign creation process will find auto-targeting to be the optimal choice. When you select auto-targeting, your campaign will default to all devices, all locations, all ages, both genders, and our Standard plan.

With Auto-Targeting, simply click Create Campaign and our approval team will select your campaign targeting.


As your campaign runs, it will automatically optimize and serve to the better performing interests and demographics. It is also possible to auto-target some aspects of your campaign (such as “Interests”) while manual targeting others (such as “Demographics”).

Manual Targeting

Our manual targeting option is perfect for advertisers who want to get more hands-on and take greater control of their targeting. When you go through the manual creation process, you can choose every aspect of your campaign’s targeting. This includes interest selection, whether you’d like to “strictly limit” interests, demographic criteria, serving priority, and scheduling.

This campaign has been manually targeted. To begin Manual targeting, click edit under Interests in step 2 of the campaign creation process.

Our Auto and Manual options offer two different but equally effective methods of targeting your campaigns. Which you choose depends on your content and your needs as an advertiser, but it’s worth giving both a shot and seeing what works for you.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can reach us at advertisers@stumbleupon.com or by tweeting us @PaidDiscovery, and we’d be happy to help.

Stumble On,

Cyrus
Ads & Content Manager

Array

Social Media and Paid Discovery, It’s Meant to Be

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

We see many different types of ads on a daily basis. While there are a variety of ways to engage with our users, some work better than others depending on your audience.

One particular strategy that we’ve noticed works well in engaging users is social media integration. Here are several ways you can successfully integrate social media with Paid Discovery:

1) Allow users to experience your content by logging in with a social media account.

  • Ideally, you should give users an option when asking to connect through their social media profile, such as “Connect with Facebook/Twitter” or “Continue without Facebook/Twitter”.
  • Enabling users to proceed to your content without social media integration is just as important – you don’t want to prevent any users who are hesitant or may not have social media accounts from seeing your content.
  • Make the experience personal. When users feel an attachment to the product or brand they are more likely to engage and share your content – giving you much more time to woo them!

2) Incorporate social media links on the page you submit.

  • Adding social media links and badges to submitted pages will allow users to follow your brand or product across the web.

      -On average, installing a StumbleUpon badge will increase the traffic on your site by 25%        within one month.
      -As more visitors use the badge and share, your content has an increasing chance of going        viral through StumbleUpon.

  • When users “like” your page using a badge, they’ll see updates on their social networks and keep in touch with your content.
  • When users are stumbling, they want to be assured your content is legitimate, so having a healthy number of likes, followers, etc., is important. Don’t worry if you don’t have a big social media presence yet because Paid Discovery can help you get there!

3) Submitting social media pages as campaigns

  • Social media pages that require users to log-in to their account, are overly commercial, require multiple steps to access content or are not informationally rich, do not typically work well with Paid Discovery.
  • Feel free to submit social media pages that you believe would fit the StumbleUpon user experience and we’ll let you know if it works with our community.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can reach us at advertisers@stumbleupon.com or by tweeting us @PaidDiscovery, and we’d be happy to help.

Stumble On,

Eric
Ads & Content Coordinator

Paid Discovery Tip of the Week 4

Monday, April 16th, 2012

Whether you are new to Paid Discovery or just need a refresher course, we bring you weekly tips and tricks to help you better understand and manage your Paid Discovery campaigns.

This week…

Let’s find out together

Rather than offering a general tip that I think you will find helpful, it may be beneficial to take a look at what you, our advertisers, want to learn. Chances are if one of our advertisers have a question about it, others do as well.

A lot of you write to us at advertisers@stumbleupon.com and some of you Tweet us your questions @PaidDiscovery. Although less common, we also receive some inquiries via Quora. Here’s a look at a few of the most popular questions:

Question: “I’m trying to understand Standard vs Premium pricing in Stumbleupon Paid Discovery. From a “serving” point of view, can anyone give me some advice so I can avoid lengthy AB testing?”

Answer: We offer different plans for how quickly and how many users you reach with your content, depending on your marketing objectives. Serving priority dictates the order with which the web page is considered for placement, based on available inventory. Highest priority serves first, net availability is given to normal, and the remaining availability is saved for the lowest.

Please see below for a detailed breakdown of the plans:

Highest ($0.25)

  • Ensure short flight windows receive maximum traffic.
  • Pay only for the most engaged users.

Normal ($0.10)

  • Ensure you reach optimal traffic availablity.
  • Pay only for engaged users.

Lowest ($0.05)

  • Reach remaining serving availability.
  • Ineligible for advanced reporting, skip refunds & mobile.

The difference between the engagement level of visitors: We are able to carefully measure how engaged our users are with your content, and we’ll only charge you for the visitors that are at the engagement level you specify. We measure engagement by many factors, including time spent, page interaction and activity, share rate, and many more.

The majority of our advertisers use the normal serving priority ($0.10). This allows you to pay only for engaged visits and have access to advanced reports to better understand how to optimize your campaigns.

Question: If your website has great original content, how do you create the best possible StumbleUpon campaign to promote that content so it takes off naturally on StumbleUpon?

Answer: As a general rule, entertaining and informative content works best within the StumbleUpon community. As users stumble, paid content is delivered to them seamlessly along with organic content. Ideally, StumbleUpon users won’t even notice that your page is sponsored. Our millions of members are looking to discover new and interesting stuff, and they’ll give you valuable feedback (thumbs up or thumbs down ratings) if you provide them with an entertaining, enlightening, or informative experience. Another good guideline is to avoid only advertising your homepage. We recommend that you try advertising additional pages from your domain in order to connect with users more than once. Finally, pages that are engaging and provide more detailed information about your product or service (e.g. Learn More, Preview, Demos, Features, Screenshots, Blogs) generally perform better in our community.

Question: What stumbleupon score is needed for content to go viral?

Answer: Your campaign score is not the sole determinant of free stumbles. Free stumbles are inherently fluctuating and based on numerous factors so there is no real simple formula for receiving them. The best advice is to submit a diverse amount of content that our users are likely to thumb up and share and then hopefully your content gains viral traction in our index. It helps to submit different pages from your site so that you increase the chances of something going viral on your site. To learn more about what type of content does well in Paid Discovery, check out our tips.

Search for “StumbleUpon Paid Discovery” on Quora and check out other questions our advertisers have asked – use their experience and insight as a guide to help you understand Paid Discovery better.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can reach us at advertisers@stumbleupon.com or by tweeting us @PaidDiscovery, and we’d be happy to help.

Stumble On,

Rishvika
Ads and Content Coordinator

Array

Measuring Engagement in Paid Discovery

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

We’ve previously discussed the importance of looking at the full picture when measuring visitors’ engagement with your site. Today we wanted to briefly highlight what metrics to look at in your Standard and Premium campaigns for exactly these kinds of engagement tests.

With Paid Discovery, our advanced reporting shows “time spent on page” from the moment a visitor stumbles onto your submitted site until they exit or stumble again, so you get an accurate representation of how long our users are interacting with your content.

We understand that as an advertiser, you want to make sure your content isn’t skipped over when users are actively stumbling through their streams. For this reason, Paid Discovery guarantees engaged visitors to advertisers who submit their campaigns as Standard or Premium. That’s why we don’t charge you for visits that last less than five seconds. For visits that we consider “unengaged,” we automatically refund the associated funds back into the your account the next day.


With advanced reporting, you can compare the time spent on your site across topic, device, gender, age range, country, date, and more.

The reporting dashboard for your Standard and Premium campaigns will also show how viral your content turned out to be – i.e., how much was it shared on social media outlets.

You can see the virality statistics for your Standard or Premium campaigns on the Reports page.

Regardless of the campaign type you choose, Paid Discovery gives you the opportunity of presenting your content to a thriving community of users looking to find the best of the web. We look forward to continuing to work with you to drive your content marketing distribution needs!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can reach us at advertisers@stumbleupon.com or by tweeting us @PaidDiscovery, and we’d be happy to help.

Stumble On,

Cyrus
Ads & Content Coordinator

Paid Discovery Tip of the Week 3

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

Whether you are new to Paid Discovery or just need a refresher course, we bring you weekly tips and tricks to help you better understand and manage your Paid Discovery campaigns.

This week…

Activating, Pausing, and Archiving Campaigns

Knowing when to start and stop your campaigns is an easy and effective way to manage your account.

Simply click the symbol to activate, symbol to pause, and symbol to archive your campaigns. Please see below for details:

Let’s take a step back.

In order to make good use of these features, you must first have an understanding of what these terms mean – so, here are some good ol’ fashion definitions to catch you up to speed:

  • Active Campaigns: Campaigns approved and currently running.

  • Paused Campaigns: Campaigns approved and currently not running.

  • Archived Campaigns: An archived campaign is stopped and able to be hidden.
    *Note: To hide archived campaigns, uncheck the “Show Archived Campaigns” box. While paused campaigns show up on csv exports, archived campaigns do not.


Now that you have a better understanding of how these features function, you are ready to learn how to use them! To activate, pause, or archive a campaign, follow the steps listed below:

  1. Login to your Paid Discovery account and access your account dashboard.
  2. In your URL dashboard – find and select the URL you would like to edit.
  3. Find the campaign you would like to activate, pause or archive – under the “Status” column, select the symbol to activate, symbol to pause, and symbol to archive your campaigns.

Isn’t that easy? Now, give it a try!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can reach us at advertisers@stumbleupon.com or by tweeting us @PaidDiscovery, and we’d be happy to help.

Stumble On,

Rishvika
Ads and Content Coordinator