StumbleUpon’s New Ad Platform: An Inside Look
Earlier this week, the social discovery tool StumbleUpon revamped its advertising platform.
These changes don’t so much change the basics of how StumbleUpon Advertising works, as much as they add additional tools and metrics for advertisers to better track and understand the results of their campaigns.
I got to speak with StumbleUpon’s founder and CEO Garrett Camp, as well as Marc Leibowitz, VP of business development and marketing, about the changes and what it means for advertisers who want to better target their content.
StumbleUpon’s advertising platform has always worked by integrating sponsored pages into organically liked or stumbled pages. Users rate and share content the same way, whether a page is sponsored or not — but they are made aware of pages that are sponsored. Advertisers can target their campaigns to specific StumbeUpon categories so that sites can be shown to the right kind of people.
Last fall, StumbleUpon competitor Digg launched a similar platform and early results have been very positive.
StumbleUpon isn’t changing the structure of how ads are displayed to users — that works, and works quite well — for users and advertisers. Instead, most of the changes with the platform are most noticeable on the backend.
What’s New
You can view this video tour to get an overview of how StumbleUpon Advertising works, but the big difference for advertisers is that the platform is now built on top of the same technology that powers Su.pr, the URL shortener for content publishers that StumbleUpon launched last summer. This new platform is faster and more responsive and now StumbleUpon ads is better integrated with the overall site.
Additionally, the dashboard and how data is reported has been greatly enhanced. In the past, advertisers were able to see traffic generated from stumbles they purchased, but not for any organic traffic that also came from the campaign. If a lot of people end of liking and recommending a sponsored site, it can end up getting several times the number pageviews from organic, unpaid traffic than from the actual campaign.
This greatly changes CPV, but this wasn’t accounted for in the old system. Garrett told me that some advertisers would use their own site logs to calculate the additional traffic they received from Stumble, but that’s a process that should really be done by the advertising platform. And now it is. When you can actually see your effective CPV (which, depending on the site or URL, could be considerably lower than the flat rate of $0.05 per impression that StumbleUpon charges), it can make evaluating how to budget future campaigns more efficient.
In addition to viewing paid and free traffic, the dashboard has now made it easier to identify trends and other metrics for success.
Payment options for advertisers have also been expanded. In the past, PayPal was the only way you could make an ad purchase. Now you can use Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover. This is good for companies that might like to allocate funds to certain cards without having to divert things to a separate PayPal account.
The Future
Marc came to StumbleUpon from Google, where he was a senior director of strategic partnerships. As such, he brings in lots of experience from the AdWords and AdSense teams and this is clearly having an impact on how Stumble does its ad platform.
This is a good thing. As a writer, I know that StumbleUpon can be a terrific source of traffic — its community is engaged and its recommendation algorithm is sound. Highlighting these benefits to advertisers is key to building the community — and the company.
As it stands, I like the direction Stumble is taking its advertising platform and I hope to see even deeper integration between publishing and advertising tools in the future.
Have you ever used StumbleUpon or other social recommendation services for advertising campaigns? Let us know your experiences!
Reviews: Google, StumbleUpon
Tags: advertising, digg, stumbleupon, stumbleupon ads
Stihl’s autumn calendar automatically rips through to tomorrow
Unless they’re incredibly quiet or potentially explosive, you won’t find us waxing poetic (or even prosaic) about leaf blowers. But if a company that produced leaf blowers made a motorized calendar that tore off its own pages? We’d tell you about that in a heartbeat — even if the wonderfully wasteful contraption turned out to be a viral ad by agency Euro RSCG rather than an actual household organizer, and even if its pages aren’t nearly as saucy as Stihl’s usual NSFW fare. Believe it or not, there’s no blade inside that brushed aluminum shell; the process works by ripping out the bookbinding thread along the calendar’s spine using a motorized reel. Join us in celebrating the wonder of pressed dead wood floating to earth all by its lonesome with a short video after the break.
Continue reading Stihl’s autumn calendar automatically rips through to tomorrow
Stihl’s autumn calendar automatically rips through to tomorrow originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
HP ropes in Dr. Dre for ‘Lets Do Amazing’ personality makeover
When you think about HP, do you think about printers or maybe IT outsourcing? How about HP smartphones, ever think of them? You do know that HP still sells iPAQs right? That’s ok, we have to remind ourselves too, occasionally, and therein lies the problem: most consumers don’t have any idea what HP’s 300,000 employees are up to… or even care. (Ever encounter a rabid HP fanboy before?) While the enthusiast community is certainly anticipating the release of HP’s Slate or next Voodoo device, you’d be hard pressed to find any “normal people” who have even heard of them. So what’s HP to do?
Starting this weekend, HP will be blitzing the airwaves with its first advertising campaign in more than five years. The $40 million, eight-week “Lets Do Amazing” campaign features a number of celebs like “zany” comedian Rhys Darby and photographer Annie Leibovitz in pitches meant to give the very serious company a lighthearted makeover while explaining what it does. Hell, even HP fave Dr. Dre was convinced to shill, though knowing HP they’ll probably use his given name of Andre Romelle Young.
HP ropes in Dr. Dre for ‘Lets Do Amazing’ personality makeover originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
YouTube Deploys Ads on Mobile Site
YouTube will now display banner ads on the mobile version of its website. Google made the announcement in a blog post today, enticing would-be advertisers to sign up by saying that users of its mobile video website are tech-savvy early adopters with cash to spend — the ideal ad demographic.
Google’s all about the mobile ads nowadays; it acquired mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million last November, and AdWords (those contextual sponsored links in search results and the like) went live on iPhone and Android a year ago.
YouTube has experimented with mobile ads in the past, running exclusive campaigns with select advertisers and deploying ads to some users in the United States and Japan. Sony advertised the DVD release of recent Oscar-nominee District 9 on YouTube mobile, for example.
The company’s leaders and engineers are wise to try and stay on top of this. The search giant is a prominent force in desktop ads, but as more people adopt smartphones it’s not hard to imagine that mobile will eventually be an even more powerful influence in the advertising sphere.
Tags: ads, advertising, business, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, youtube
First iPad ad premieres during the Oscars
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/apple/First_iPad_ad_premieres_during_the_Oscars’; Apple’s doing the Oscars up right tonight — not only was Steve Jobs making friends on the red carpet, but the company ran the first iPad ad just now during the broadcast. It’s pretty much what you’d expect out of an Apple ad, but, you know, more magical. Get ready for a blitz of these as we lead up to April 3. Video after the break.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Continue reading First iPad ad premieres during the Oscars
First iPad ad premieres during the Oscars originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Secures Broad Patent for Location-Based Advertising
Google, the world’s largest search engine and the owner of the world’s largest online advertising platform, has been granted a major U.S. patent for “determining and/or using location information in an ad system.” In other words, Google now owns a key patent for location-based advertising.
The patent, which was first discovered by Venturebeat, was filed nearly seven years ago, in September 2003, but was only granted last week.
Since then of course, location-based advertising has boomed with companies such as AdMob (acquired by Google) and Quattro Wireless (acquired by Apple) leading the charge.
That patent itself focuses on making sure businesses can better target their ads based on location information so that they can do things such as price arbitration (e.g. figuring out prices for items near you and getting the best deal). It also deals with the user interface and defining geographic areas.
This is the second major tech patent to surface this week. A week ago, Facebook won the patent for the news feed, stirring up big questions over whether Facebook would use the patent to force other companies with news feeds to take down or change their technologies.
Google’s new location-based advertising patent raises the same questions, but as we said in the news feed article, there is a huge reputation and financial cost to litigation related to patents. At the very least, though, it gives Google an advantage in mobile advertising, especially against Apple, who is quickly becoming its primary rival.
Here is the full abstract from the patent:
“The usefulness, and consequently the performance, of advertisements are improved by allowing businesses to better target their ads to a responsive audience. Location information is determined (or simply accepted) and used. For example, location information may be used in a relevancy determination of an ad. As another example, location information may be used in an attribute (e.g., position) arbitration. Such location information may be associated with price information, such as a maximum price bid. Such location information may be associated with ad performance information. Ad performance information may be tracked on the basis of location information. The content of an ad creative, and/or of a landing page may be selected and/or modified using location information. Finally, tools, such as user interfaces, may be provided to allow a business to enter and/or modify location information, such as location information used for targeting and location-dependent price information. The location information used to target and/or score ads may be, include, or define an area. The area may be defined by at least one geographic reference point (e.g., defined by latitude and longitude coordinates) and perhaps additional information. Thus, the area may be a circle defined by a geographic reference point and a radius, an ellipse defined by two geographic reference points and a distance sum, or a polygon defined by three or more geographic reference points, for example.”
Tags: advertising, Google, lbs, location based advertising, patent
Details: Twitter’s Impending Ad Platform
The guessing game surrounding Twitter’s imminent launch of an ad platform just got a little bit more focused. The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog reports that Twitter’s ad plan is tied to Twitter search (and third-parties that use the API), uses Twitter’s 140 character limit, and includes a self-serve platform akin to Google AdWords. Succinctly, it describes the plan as “Copy Google.”
As Twitter’s been implying all along, the idea here is to be as non-invasive as possible. As opposed to inserting ads into your stream, Twitter is only going to place ads in search. On the other hand, if third-party apps like TweetDeck or Seesmic jump on board (and WSJ says a revenue share will incentivize them to do so), the searches you run and set up inside the program would conceivably include ads.
Rumor has it that Twitter will reveal some of its advertising strategy when CEO Evan Williams keynotes at SXSW in two weeks, but All Things Digital isn’t so sure, writing only that a launch within “the first half of this year is a very safe bet.”
My initial thought is that while this sounds like a win for users (no annoying ads in stream), it might not be the huge windfall you’d expect for Twitter. When you search Twitter, you’re typically looking for comments and conversation about a topic — not necessarily products or services to buy that relate to it. While the 140 character twist sounds interesting, I’d expect the payout to be a lot more like AdSense (contextual ads) than AdWords (search ads).
Nonetheless, if The Wall Street Journal has the broad strategy correct, Twitter will be able to both advertise on-site and in the third-party clients that have become such a popular means for accessing the service. With Twitter now seeing upwards of 1.5 billion tweets per month, the opportunity is still likely substantial, though we don’t know what Twitter’s total search volume looks like.
It does appear, however, that we’ll at long last soon have some answers surrounding the omnipresent (if not slightly tired at this point) question of how Twitter plans to make money.
Reviews: Seesmic, TweetDeck, Twitter
Tags: advertising, MARKETING, trending, twitter
