Earlier this week, we launched Paid Discovery with the goal of expanding our product offering to increase brands’ abilities to reach their target audiences. Another goal was to improve our existing user interface to be more intuitive for our existing advertisers.

To walk you through the thought process behind Paid Discovery and what’s new, please join me for our “Skip the Click” webinar on Tuesday, March 22nd at 2pm EST / 11am PST.

We will run through the background of the project, all of the new features, what has changed from the old platform and finish with a recap of the improvements that we are planning to roll out within the next month. Please be sure to register for the webinar.

Over the past week, we have received highly constructive feedback from many of you that we are working very hard to incorporate into Paid Discovery. Our upcoming improvements have been taking this feedback to heart.

During the webinar, we will be using the Twitter hashtag #PDWebinar to manage questions that you may have. Additionally, please be sure to follow our Twitter account @PaidDiscovery to stay in touch with all of the new feature launches that we will be rolling out regularly!

Stumble On,

Jack Krawczyk
Senior Product Marketing Manager

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Many of you are already very familiar with the ads platform that we launched in 2006 that introduces quality promotional content to our userbase of over 14 million people (and growing). Today we’ve taken our tried-and-true model and reinvented it, making it even more effective at directly connecting brands with consumers who are eager to be introduced to and engage with their content. We think this new model, called StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, will solve a lot of thorny problems that marketers face when trying to build awareness and engagement online. Here’s how:

In the late 1990s, marketers tried to make their online presence known with broadly-targeted pop-ups and banners that were irrelevant (and often downright annoying) to most users and to the web pages they were viewing. The emergence of paid search certainly moved the industry forward, connecting merchants ready to sell with customers ready to buy. But while the policies and practices of online brand advertising have evolved for the better over the intervening ten-odd years, the tools of the trade for marketers trying to build awareness and engagement in advance of a transaction remain largely unchanged:  Intrusive ad units that detract from the user experience, leading many users to simply ignore such promotions entirely. In other words, there hasn’t yet been any way to successfully captivate users’ attention AND not be intrusive to users’ experience or privacy.

StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is a first-of-its-kind discovery marketing platform.

We think the solution to this problem lies in discovery marketing. When advising musicians on how to attract more followers, singer-songwriter Esther O’Connor urged them to “maximize the excitement in the sense of discovery” — something she asserts is “powerful stuff.” It’s true that discovering a product, tool, or artist creates a powerful bond between the consumer and that brand. There’s a certain excitement one feels for the discovered object, whether that be a shell on a beach or a great movie trailer on the web. But, as social media marketing guru Max Gladwell argued, this “a-ha moment” can’t seem forced. In other words, to maximize your branding impact, your future customers need to come across you as if by accident, and also not feel that they’re getting a sales pitch or a social recommendation from an online connection who doesn’t really know their preferences all that well. That’s exactly what discovery marketing does: it delivers personalized content to customers who won’t be expecting you, who won’t know to search for you or even know what term they should be using.

StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is a first-of-its-kind discovery marketing platform, combining organic and sponsored web sites into one content stream for the user. This allows advertisers to accomplish what banner ads fundamentally can’t: integrate the content users are consuming with the context with which they are consuming it. And because we believe that 300×250 and 728×90 pixels aren’t enough real estate for you to engage with customers, we give you the whole page. That way, we show users great content that, even while it’s sponsored, is in itself interesting, informative, and entertaining, and we connect marketers to the customers most eager to interact and share.

With StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, we can offer better features for advertisers with flighted and brand objectives. We’re introducing serving priority and increased social and engagement reporting features to empower you to understand which approaches work best for your target audiences. And now you can even target ads on mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad, and Android.

To find out more about all the new features offered, go to www.stumbleupon.com/pd and attend our webinar on March 22. We’ll have more content on this blog in the coming weeks about Paid Discovery and other topics, so check in again soon!

Stumble On,

Jeff Eddings
Senior Product Manager

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Many advertisers have told us that while our recently-launched auto-targeting feature saves them time and resources when deciding which topics to target on StumbleUpon, they don’t necessarily need StumbleUpon’s help in choosing location and demographic targeting settings. Perhaps they know these aspects of their target audience precisely and want to reflect this understanding in their StumbleUpon Ads campaigns, but they still want to quickly and easily optimize topic selection with auto-targeting.

As of today, you’ll be able to manually select demographic and location targeting settings while still auto-targeting topics. During the campaign creation process, you’ll be able to specify the age, gender, country, state, or city of the audience who will see your web page but leave the topic selection up to StumbleUpon.

You will now be able to specify location and demographic settings while enabling auto-targeting when you create advertising campaigns.

To select demographic and location information with auto-targeting enabled, check the box next to “Auto-Targeting.” Next, click the “Show advanced options” link to the right of the Targeting menu, where you’ll see options for choosing location, age, and gender.

Under advanced options, you can specify demographics and locations to target.

Once you’ve made your selections, click “Create campaign now” at the bottom of the page.

After your campaign is created, it will appear in your “ads pending review” dashboard. Under the “Targeting” column, you’ll see the demographic and location information details that you entered at campaign creation in parentheses. You’ll also see these targeting details listed in your “active campaigns” dashboard after your ad is approved.

Your demographic and location settings will show within the StumbleUpon Ads dashboard.

We’d love to hear how this new enhancement works for you, and whether you have any concerns or questions. Just contact us at advertisers@stumbleupon.com!

Stumble On,

Katie Gray
Communications Manager

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I wanted to thank all those who attended our webinar on Tuesday called “How to Succeed with StumbleUpon Ads.” We really enjoyed the opportunity to go through the StumbleUpon Ads essentials with a broad audience. And your questions were really insightful!

If you missed the webinar or want to recap what we talked about, you can watch it here in 5 parts. And listed below are the links that Mariko shared at the end of the presentation that will direct you to helpful tips and information:

Content guidelines
Categorizing your ad campaign
Budgeting your StumbleUpon Ads account
Keeping an eye on your campaign score
Have a bit of fun creating your own “Ads-venture”

Stumble On,

Annie Simms
Business Development Manager

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There’s a buzz this morning in San Francisco, home to StumbleUpon’s HQ, as the city celebrates the Giants’ World Series win. Well, it’s more like a roar…

While I’m not here to announce a World Series win, I do have something else to buzz about: StumbleUpon’s advertiser webinar How to Succeed with StumbleUpon Ads is coming to a computer near you Tuesday, November 9th at 11:00 AM PDT/2:00 PM EDT.

This webinar is the first of its kind here at SU, and we’re looking forward to it with great anticipation. There will be something for everyone: whether you’re new, have an intermediate knowledge of our advertising platform, or are a StumbleUpon Ads veteran, you’ll be sure to take away valuable pointers that will help you plan and optimize your next campaign.

The session will include an overview of the latest StumbleUpon facts and figures that we think are especially pertinent to advertisers and a live demo of the ads platform. Mariko Fritz-Krockow, Account Manager, will then do a deeper dive into three important advertising topics: how to choose the best content, how to categorize and target said content on StumbleUpon, and how to use the ads dashboard effectively. Questions from the audience are welcome and we’ll record the session for anyone who is not able to attend. The recording will be posted on this blog shortly after the event.

We’re very encouraged by the already overwhelming response and plan to provide more educational outreach to advertisers over the course of the coming year! To join us, please register here in advance.

See you at the webinar next Tuesday! And Congrats to the Giants! (Good luck to my hometown team the Dodgers in 2011….)

Stumble On,

Annie Simms
Business Development Manager

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Money is an important thing in this world. It’s true that money can’t buy happiness, but it does give you access to food, clothing, the internet-capable device that you are currently operating, and StumbleUpon Ads! You work hard for the money in your pocket, and I’m sure you – like me – aren’t particularly fond of wasting or miscalculating your dough. This is why budgeting, as well as knowing how to budget your StumbleUpon Ads, is so important. Making a mistake with your dollars is something you don’t want to do!

The StumbleUpon Ads dashboard gives you all the tools you need in order to budget your campaigns. Let’s look at each part, step by step, to help you understand how to use those tools.

By the Numbers- The red numbers shown here on the StumbleUpon Ads dashboard correspond to the tips written in this blog post. Follow along!

#1- Account Balance

Your Account Balance is the total amount of money that you have in your StumbleUpon Ads account. If this number reaches $0, your ads will no longer run as there is no money left in your account. You can add money to your account by clicking Add Credit.

#2 – Daily Account Budget

This area shows what you have spent today next to your daily account budget, or the amount you want to spend today. Enter this daily budget amount by clicking the “Change” link. When you first create a StumbleUpon Ads account, the default daily budget is $100. Remember to change it if you don’t want to spend that much, or want to spend more!

Here’s a tip: If your Daily Account Budget is set to $0, then none of your campaigns will run. This is a great way to pause your account while you make edits or while you wait for campaigns to be approved!

#3 – Max/Day

This is possibly the most overlooked, and most important part of your campaign budgeting. Max/Day is the maximum number of stumbles you want to serve from each campaign, each day.

Click on any Max/Day number in your data table to edit the daily spend for that campaign.

The table under your traffic graph gives you information and control over each of your ad campaigns, and the “Max/Day” (highlighted in the table above) allows you to set the number of stumbles that you want served from a specific campaign. If you don’t want to spend an equal amount of money on each of your campaigns, you can set different maximums for each of them.

The “Max/Day” is shown in stumbles, rather than in dollars. Click on the Max/Day that you want to edit, and you will see a pop-up menu asking you to state how much money you would like to give to that specific campaign, each day.

Now here is the important part. Make sure that all your campaign “Max/Day” cost totals add up to your daily account budget! This will allow all your campaigns to run evenly throughout the day. Our system will first look at the total amount that you are allotting to each of your campaigns, and divide by 24 hours, calculating how much you want to spend an hour. Then it will start serving the campaigns at that pace. But if the system hits a limit (a campaign limit or the daily budget limit), it will stop serving that ad.

If your daily account budget is $20 and you only have one active campaign with a $20 daily campaign budget, your campaigns will run evenly over 24 hours. But, if you have a daily account budget of $20 and two campaigns, each with a daily campaign budget of $20, our ad system will stop running your campaigns after 12 hours. If you have a daily account budget of $20, and your campaign is set to $40, then your ad will also stop running after 12 hours. So make sure you edit all the default settings so that your campaigns serve evenly throughout the day.

#4 Cost

Finally, this is the total amount that you have spent on this specific campaign, all together. Tune in to the Ads Blog soon for more on how to evaluate whether your campaigns are getting you the best return on investment!

Stumble On,

Mariko Fritz-Krockow
Advertising Account Manager

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Fall seems to creep up on us every year. Maybe it’s that holiday shopping cycles begin earlier and earlier – I actually saw Christmas decorations on sale at a local store several weeks ago! While the onset of Fall can mean very different things depending on where you live – e.g., a crisp chill in the air and leaves changing color in the Northeast, abundant sunshine and 85-degree highs here in the San Francisco Bay Area (well, in normal Septembers, anyway) – there’s one telltale sign of autumn to which all marketers can relate: Q4 marketing kickoffs.

With the aim of making your Q4 marketing efforts simpler and more effective, StumbleUpon Ads is excited to introduce auto-targeting for all advertisers. Auto-targeting lets StumbleUpon choose the optimal topics and demographics for your campaign, using our sophisticated recommendation technology to figure out how to get you greater reach and relevance with less work and at lower effective cost. (This is especially good news for advertisers who may have had success in targeting certain topics but are wondering which other categories they can target and see a strong ROI.) In other words, let StumbleUpon do the heavy lifting for you.

In the "Create a Campaign" menu, a box for auto-targeting will automatically be checked under targeting settings. If you wish to handpick the category to which you'd like to target a certain URL, simply uncheck the box and choose a category from the menu that appears.

Now whenever you create a new campaign, you’ll see a box checked that enables this feature automatically, as seen above. You’ll still have full control over your budget and be able to pause and activate your campaigns whenever you wish. If you decide to manually target your campaigns, just uncheck the box next to “Auto-targeting” on the “Create new campaign” page and select the categories you think best describe your content.

When viewing your campaigns on the StumbleUpon Ads dashboard, you’ll see the label “Auto-targeting” in italics next to the campaigns with auto-targeting enabled, as seen below. You’ll be able to distinguish your auto-targeted from manually-targeted campaigns in your exported Excel or .csv files as well.

Check the "Targeting" column on your StumbleUpon Ads dashboard to see which campaigns you selected to be auto-targeted.

So if you’re looking to cost-effectively reach a large, highly engaged audience of potential customers with minimal administrative overhead, auto-targeted StumbleUpon Ads are for you. Please feel free to send any feedback or questions to advertisers@stumbleupon.com, and read more about this launch in our press release.

Posted by:

Katie Gray
Communications Manager

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