With more than 20 million users, sending more than 1 billion referrals per month, StumbleUpon is a major player in our attention economy.

But what does the StumbleUpon interest graph really look like? What sort of content will perform best on StumbleUpon? And how can marketers use StumbleUpon to accomplish their goals?

(If you aren’t familiar with the basics of StumbleUpon, I recommend you read this post & sign up for an account. Stumble your interests, and use the service as a consumer before you try to market all over it.)

What is the StumbleUpon Audience Interested in?

One of the biggest challenges with social media marketing is finding the perfect fit between your content and the social media site’s audience. If you share the right content on the right site, it can go viral, get tons of traffic, lots of links, and really move the needle on your web promotion efforts. If you get it wrong, you’ll rapidly find yourself getting flagged/banned by the site in question.

Fortunately, most of these social media release a great deal of data about their audience to their advertisers, and StumbleUpon is no exception. In August 2011, StumbleUpon released some audience data that we can use to understand the nature of StumbleUpon’s audience.

I used ManyEyes from IBM & Tableau Public from Tableau to create some interactive visualizations of the StumbleUpon Audience. (You’ll need to have Java enabled to view these interactive visualizations.)

Categories Versus Topics

StumbleUpon has two layers of interest taxonomy – Category & Topic. Categories consist of a number of topics and are broad fields like “Science & Technology” or “Arts/History”. Topics are more granular, going from broad topics like Humor to narrow topics like Glaucoma.

StumbleUpon Categories

(Unfortunately WordPress is stripping out my interactive visualization – you can see it here – http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/the-stumbleupon-audience-visualize)

StumbleUpon Topics

(Unfortunately WordPress is stripping out my interactive visualization – you can see it here – http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/the-stumbleupon-audience-visualize)

What are the Most Popular Topics on StumbleUpon?

The interest graph on StumbleUpon is remarkably similar to the distribution of search engine terms – there are a few highly popular topics, a ‘chunky middle’ of somewhat popular topics, and a ‘long tail’ of hundreds of niche topics.

If we visualize this as a block histogram chart, it looks like this:

If we look at this another way, it should look even more familiar to search marketers:

What are the most & least popular topics on StumbleUpon?

Unsurprisingly, the most popular topics on StumbleUpon mirror the most popular topics in all media.
General interest topics like Humor, Music, & Bizarre/Oddities are the most popular:

By contrast, the least popular topics are all over the place – ranging from Taxation to Glaucoma to Squash.

How Can Marketers Best Use StumbleUpon?

When users are on StumbleUpon, they’re looking for interesting things to look at, rather than things to buy. This is a sharp contrast with search traffic, where someone is looking for something specific, often with purchase intent. StumbleUpon traffic has all entertainment intent – it’s ‘lean back’ traffic, instead of search’s ‘lean forward’ traffic.

However, this ‘lean back’ entertainment intent makes the StumbleUpon audience prime for content promotion – they’re in a great mood to share, link to, and enjoy your content. Combine some great content with StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery service, and you can generate a large number of social media conversations & links, which can in turn deliver higher search engine rankings and a great deal of revenue.

How Should I Target My Paid Discovery Campaign?

StumbleUpon Paid Discovery lets you target either categories or topics. Which topics & categories should you target? Should you go big or small?

If you’re trying to build buzz: You’ll need a big audience to generate the thousands of tweets and shares you’ll need to make your content ‘go big’. Aim for the largest segments possible – and try to make your content visually engaging & funny. As you can see, the largest StumbleUpon topics revolve around a) things that are funny, and b) things that look cool.

If you’re trying to build links: If you want to build links to grow your search engine visibility, go niche. While there may only be 12,604 of 20 million Stumblers interested in Glaucoma, you can bet the ones that subscribe to that topic are deeply interested in ocular health. This is how you can target the ‘linkerati’ – the bloggers and other opinion makers that make a disproportionate number of links on the web.

Conclusion: StumbleUpon a Wealth of Great Traffic

StumbleUpon is a great channel for marketers, and seems to be only improving. (Notice the vertical line of user growth in the image at the beginning of the article.) Understand the StumbleUpon audience, what they’re looking for, and you can swan dive into a stream of great visitors.

The post Visualizing the StumbleUpon Audience appeared first on Portent.

Here are 4 under the radar SEO tools I learned about at SMX:

Chartbeat

What it is: Chartbeat is real-time analytics for your website. Rather than viewing delayed aggregate pageviews, Chartbeat lets you analyze behavior of individual users in real-time.
Why You Should Use It: Google Analytics was great when everything was a pageview. Now that the web has grown to be social and real-time, you need a new generation of analytics to match. Warning: VERY ADDICTIVE.
What It Looks Like:

How Much It Costs: 30-Day Free Trial. Subscriptions start at $9.95/month.
Tweetable: Chartbeat is real time analytics. Warning: VERY ADDICTIVE <<Tweet This!>>
Hat Tip: Danny Sullivan

Soovle

What it is: Soovle is Google Suggest on steroids – you can use Soovle to get the suggested search terms for any phrase from Google, Amazon.com, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Answers.com, and Wikipedia.
Why You Should Use It: Do keyword research even faster and get more ideas.
What It Looks Like:

How Much It Costs: Free!
Tweetable: Soovle is search engine suggestions on steroids. <<Tweet This!>>
Hat Tip: Christine Churchill

WhiteSpark Citation Finder

What it is: WhiteSpark Citation Finder finds you citation and directory listing opportunities. Rather than simply listing the big 5 directories everyone knows about, Whitespark Citation Finder goes deeper and finds citation opportunities you’ve never dreamed of.
Why You Should Use It: Local search optimization is about optimizing places and citations, not just websites. With this tool, you can find citations more efficiently then you ever could before.
What It Looks Like:

How Much It Costs: Free!
Tweetable: WhiteSpark Citation Finder is the easiest way to find local citation opportunities. <<Tweet This!>>
Hat Tip: Matt McGee

Tout

What it is: Tout lets you send emails en mass from templates. The app also gives you email analytics – so you can see who opened and who took action on your emails.
Why You Should Use It: Tout was built to scale press outreach and sales emails, so it’s perfect for industrial-strength link building. You can also see which of your outreach templates have the most effective message.
What It Looks Like:

How Much It Costs: Plans range from $12/month for 1 user to $99/month for your whole team.
Tweetable: Tout is the best way to send link building emails. <<Tweet This!>>
Hat Tip: Justin Briggs

What are your favorite SEO Tools?

The post 4 Under the Radar SEO Tools appeared first on Portent.

We’ve got a new and improved version of the Cheat Sheet for 2015!

Google Analytics is Hard

Google Analytics is tricky. There are cookies, utm_codes, and lots of counterintuitive definitions. As Kanye West would say, “It’s enough to drive a sane man biz-erk.”

Can’t Someone Put This All in One Place?

When I was studying for the Google Analytics Individual Qualification, I was overwhelmed by the number of cookie specifications, tracking parameters, and complex definitions I needed to know.

“Couldn’t someone put this all in one place?” I asked. “Maybe in a visually appealing way?”

Introducing: the Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet

It includes convenient summaries of:

• URL Tagging
• Regular Expressions
• Cookies (or Biscuits, if you’re English or Tracy)

And…

• Definitions that most people get wrong

And you can download it today, not for $39, not for $29, not even for $9.99…

But for the low, low cost of one tweet. Imagine how delighted your friends and colleagues will be when you share this with them. They’ll be pleased as punch. Really, they will.

Download the Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet Here, and Pay with a Tweet

PS – if you like Google Analytics, make sure you check out Ian’s Original Google Analytics Cheat Sheet.

The post Advanced Google Analytics Cheat Sheet appeared first on Portent.