SEO
Over $200K Spent. Here’s What I Learned
While it’s relatively easy to learn advertising on Quora, it takes a lot of trial and error to find out what works best. A few tricks can make your work more efficient and your campaigns more effective.
I’ve been using Quora Ads since it began in 2017, spent over $200K advertising for three global brands, and given lectures on how to succeed in it. I’ve managed campaigns on Facebook and Twitter too, so I have a fair comparison of what makes Quora Ads good or bad.
We’ll go through eight valuable Quora Ads takeaways that will save you tens of thousands of dollars in both ad spend and work hours.
Let’s dive in.
The days of super cheap clicks and impressions on Quora are long gone, but it can still be significantly cheaper compared to mainstream platforms like Google, Facebook, or Twitter.
I disclosed some data with the Quora team via a success story and a podcast episode based on my experience from previous employment. I was comparing this to search and display campaigns in Google Ads because the intent of Quora users isn’t far from that.
So back then on Quora Ads, we had:
- 65% lower CPC than comparable Google search campaigns.
- 46% lower CPA than comparable Google search campaigns.
As of now in Ahrefs, I can share the following numbers for comparable campaigns, which are:
- 40–50% cheaper CPC than Facebook.
- 60–95% cheaper CPC than Google’s search campaigns (yes, the difference can be that huge).
These are the cases where Quora is significantly cheaper than other main advertising platforms.
Quora has more expensive CPCs and CPMs (2–6 times) than Google Display Network campaigns, but it still seems like a great deal considering the intent and engagement of Quora visitors. More on this later.
Two main factors that determine how to best structure campaigns on Quora are budget and bid settings. The unfortunate thing is that the budget is set at campaign level, while bidding comes at the ad set level.
Here’s a problem that you can easily run into because of this:
All ad sets were running side by side, with each having an estimated potential reach in the lower millions weekly. As you can see, the CTR of the most pushed ad set isn’t the highest, so engagement signals don’t play a huge role in Quora’s delivery algorithm.
It’s the bid size that makes the biggest difference.
Based on my experience, Quora’s delivery algorithms heavily favor ad sets with higher bids. Running multiple ad sets within one campaign becomes a challenge to optimize the ad delivery.
One solution is to bid the same across all running ad sets within one campaign. But that could create more problems if the targeting differs. It also doesn’t ensure balanced delivery.
I’ve always leaned toward the second solution: run just one ad set per campaign at a given time. It also has its downs, as you have to create and manage many campaigns at once. But it’s the best I could do. Here’s a sneak peek at Ahrefs’ blog promotion campaigns structure:
As you can see, I grouped campaigns by their geo-targeting and device type. This is the only structure that allowed me to properly manage the campaign budget allocation and ad distribution.
I generally recommend creating a separate campaign for each country and device. But I bundled together four countries to make the account easier to manage. The reasons for this were similar CPCs across all those grouped countries, confirming that impressions were being distributed proportionally to each country’s population.
PRO TIP
Fortunately, my Quora account managers were always helpful and dug into such data for me. It’s worth trying to get in touch with them should you ever need data you can’t get yourself.
Quora Ads offers four different types of primary targeting:
Audience targeting and broad targeting are things we can encounter on other platforms too. Nothing too groundbreaking there, so let’s focus on the other two primary targeting types: contextual and behavioral targeting.
You can read what it’s about in the screenshots, so let me jump straight to the best use cases.
In Ahrefs, I most often went for the Contextual -> Topics targeting shown above. It gives us solid control over where the ads are shown. But it pays off to learn how Quora assigns topics to its questions, as that’s far from perfect.
To do this, look up the topic in the search bar and go through the results:
Switch to the “Answer” tab to only see questions, then check the list and inspect all the labels under a few questions after clicking “View question log” to better understand how good or bad of a job Quora does in your niche:
Here’s an example of how broad or irrelevant Quora can go sometimes:
However, in my experience, going a bit more broad with the choice of topics usually performed better than trying to be very specific.
Then we have Behavioral -> Interests targeting:
This type of targeting resembles what we’re used to from Facebook or Google. Quora models the interests of each user and then tries to show them relevant ads.
You get a higher potential reach at the cost of relying on a black box. That generally results in lower engagement but also in lower CPCs since the much more relevant contextual targeting comes with a slightly higher price.
Now that you’re more familiar with the primary targeting types, we can visualize the competitive advantage of Quora Ads:
Both Topics and Interests sub-targeting types are the broadest ones in each category. This is desirable for the purpose of most Ahrefs campaigns.
But my previous company needed much more granular targeting.
The possibility to target each Question (technically individual Quora URLs) was at the top of our targeting arsenal.
Choosing specific questions to bid on with your ads may be the biggest advantage of Quora Ads. You can show your ads to Quora visitors who are thinking about problems your product can solve at that exact moment as they read answers to that question.
You also have complete control over the ad placement, which comes in handy when all the topic labels are too broad for your needs.
But how do we find the right questions to target?
Given that Quora drives an estimated ~114M non-branded clicks from organic search a month, it only makes sense to incorporate some SEO processes into this questions mining task.
There are multiple paths to getting an exhaustive list of Quora question URLs. I’d recommend starting with the most efficient one: using Quora’s own questions suggestion feature after you click on “Bulk add” here:
Then write down at least 10 keywords that best describe your business, products, or problems your audience is trying to solve. The more, the better. Add your competitor brands and products too. If you’ve already done some keyword research for SEO in the past, then this is a piece of cake.
You’ll get a list of questions sorted by weekly views. As you can see in the list below, the matching isn’t perfect, as it shows “stock market” questions based on my “marketing” keyword input. On the other hand, you don’t need to worry about including exact match keywords.
You can select the most relevant questions to target and end the questions research here. But I like to take this one step further and gather organic traffic data for each question. It helps with question prioritization that we’ll discuss in the next point.
So while you’re in the “Questions to target” window, open up Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar and head over to “Outgoing links” since all the questions in the list are linked through.
Click on the export button, and you’ll get a list of all the URLs there. All that’s left is to filter the list for relevant questions, copy-paste it into Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis tool, and sort the table by organic traffic:
There you have it—organic traffic estimations on top of Quora’s traffic data. I’ll always prioritize questions that get solid organic traffic over what’s currently trending on Quora, as Google tends to be a more sustainable traffic source.
You can now run highly relevant and engaging campaigns, including those that retarget Quora users based on questions they visited in the past. Just copy-paste the input window between Contextual – Questions and Behavioral – Question history.
Organic growth on Quora isn’t easy. But still without putting in too much effort, some of my answers got tens, even hundreds of thousands of views and rank among the top answers:
OK, I cheated a bit. The easiest way to get such numbers is to simply boost your answers with Quora Ads. It provides a unique ad format called Promoted Answers:
Just feed the system with any answer URL, and it will show the answer as an ad throughout the platform based on your targeting:
The best thing about this is the ability to promote any answer. And since we just went through sourcing a list of the most relevant Quora questions, we can leverage it here too. Just go through the answers in the most promising questions and note all answer URLs that positively mention your brand or product.
If you decide to skip the Questions targeting, you can also do a simple search in Google using search operators to filter Quora URLs that mention your brand or product:
I haven’t run these Promoted Answers in a while. But back then, I was getting a cheap CPM at around $1. It seemed to work well for brand awareness campaigns. I’m also convinced that it has an influence on how Quora ranks the answers for a certain question, as you get much more views and upvotes compared to the rest.
To sum it up: Quora is no different than other platforms, and you get the best results if you properly combine both organic and paid marketing. Promoted Answers are an interesting ad format worth experimenting with for increasing brand awareness.
You can learn more about succeeding with your organic efforts in a guide by my colleague, SQ, who took over marketing topics on Quora by storm a few years ago.
One of the earlier points is about Quora Ads being cheaper than other platforms. This, of course, depends on how well managed and optimized your campaigns are because, sometimes, the suggested CPCs are anything but cheap:
First of all, besides brand awareness campaigns, I always go for bidding on the CPC basis. I found it cheaper than bidding on CPM. Also, I have no data about CPA bids, as we don’t use tracking pixels in Ahrefs.
In terms of CPCs, I usually stick to the lower range of the suggested bid. I then readjust the bids based on the impression share it gets. My rule of thumb is keeping the impression share between 10% and 30%, which I found to be the best balance between solid ad delivery and reasonable prices.
I still kept some of my more expensive ad sets below 10% impression share if they easily managed to spend the daily budget, thanks to broader targeting and reach.
Speaking of reach, I found Quora to sometimes report weirdly overestimated potential weekly impressions:
I wrote down a specific case where it kept showing 3,500–15,000 potential weekly impressions in an ad set that only received 400 impressions with 12.5% impression share over six months. It fixed the reach estimation in this case already, so I’m only left with a written note and no screenshot.
But considering we can trust the numbers in most cases, let’s do some quick math with relevant numbers based on Ahrefs’ advertising on Quora.
A campaign with a $50 daily budget and an average CPM of $2.5 will spend the budget after 20,000 daily impressions. That equals 140,000 impressions weekly. A 15% impression share means that our running ad set(s) will need to have potential weekly impressions of at least ~930K, let’s say a million.
That said, Quora claims 300 million+ monthly visitors, but it’s sometimes rather difficult to put together targeting that results in a big enough estimated potential reach. At least in our SEO and marketing niche.
All in all, the vast majority of ad sets I ran recently had a weekly potential reach between 500K and 10M. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to achieve the desired performance. You can easily run into a situation where you need to decide what makes the most sense for you:
- Increase bids for higher impression shares
- Broaden targeting for higher reach at the cost of a potentially lower ad relevance
- Keep your campaigns hitting the ceiling and allocate the rest of the budget elsewhere
And this is just the beginning when it comes to scaling up your campaigns.
As explained earlier, the best structured account for optimal ad delivery and effectiveness comes at the cost of being more difficult to manage. Creating new ad sets and running new ads involve a lot of clicking around. There’s no duplicating and controlling ad sets at scale. You have to do them one by one.
Once you get the hang of it, it takes a matter of a few minutes. But it’s still annoying.
Should you only require duplicating, uploading, or editing ads in multiple ad sets at once, then Quora’s ad editor comes in handy.
When I brought this inconvenience up with my account managers, they told me that my approach seemed to be the most efficient indeed. A good thing is that they offered help managing the campaigns if the clicking around ever became too bothersome.
So while account management and scalability in Quora Ads are far from perfect, it at least partially compensates for that with the best customer service I’ve encountered with any advertising platform.
Final thoughts
I’m not a PPC specialist, just a marketer that took the opportunity to learn to run Quora Ads and a few other advertising platforms on the go. I strived to describe only the most important and interesting takeaways that could take a while for even experienced PPC specialists to figure out.
Other than this, there are more similarities to other PPC platforms than differences. That’s why I didn’t even bring up creating ads, for example—there’s nothing special about this on Quora.
So are you going to give it a shot? Do you have any questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
Stop Overcomplicating Things. Entity SEO is Just SEO
“Entity SEO”.
Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Not only does the word “entity” sound foreign, it feels like yet another thing to add to your never-ending SEO to-do list. You’re barely afloat when it comes to SEO, but ohgawd here comes one more new thing to dedicate your scarce resources.
I have good news for you though: You don’t have to do entity SEO.
Why? Because you’re probably already doing it.
Let’s start from the beginning.
In 2012, Google announced the Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base of entities and the relationships between them.
An entity is any object or concept that can be distinctly identified. This includes tangibles like people, places, and organizations, and intangibles like colors, concepts, and feelings.
For example, the footballer Federico Chiesa is an entity:
So is the famous British-Indian restaurant Dishoom:
Entities are connected by edges, which describe the relationships between them.
Introducing the Knowledge Graph helped improve Google’s search results because:
- Google could better understand search intent — People search for the same thing but describe it in different ways. Google can now understand this and serve the same results.
- It reduced reliance on keyword matching — Matching the number of keywords on a page doesn’t guarantee relevance; also it prevents crafty SEOs from keyword stuffing.
- It reduced Google’s computational load — The Internet is virtually infinite and Google simply cannot understand the meaning of every word, paragraph, webpage, and website. Entities provide a structure where Google can improve understanding while minimizing load.
For example, even though we didn’t mention the actor’s name, Google can understand we’re looking for Harrison Ford and therefore shows his filmography:
That’s because Hans Solo and Harrison Ford are closely connected entities in the Knowledge Graph. Google shows Knowledge Graph data in SERP features like Knowledge Panels and Knowledge Cards.
With this knowledge, we can then define entity SEO as optimizing your website or webpages for such entities.
If Google has moved to entity-oriented search, then entity SEO is just SEO. As my colleague Patrick Stox says, “The entity identification part is more on Google’s end than on our end.”
I mean, if you look at the ‘entity SEO’ tactics you find in blog posts, you’ll discover that they’re mostly just SEO tactics:
- Earn a Wikipedia page
- Create a Google Business Profile
- Add internal links
- Create all digital assets Google is representing on the page (e.g., videos, images, Twitter)
- Develop topical authority
- Include semantically related words on a page
- Add schema markup
Let’s be honest. If you’re serious about SEO and are investing in it, then it’s likely you’re already doing most of the above.
Regardless of entities, wouldn’t you want a Wikipedia page? After all, it confers benefits beyond “entity SEO”. Brand recognition, backlinks from one of the world’s most authoritative sites (albeit nofollow)—any company would want that.
If you’re a local business, you’ve probably created a Google Business Profile. Adding internal links is just SEO 101.
And billions of blistering barnacles, creating all digital assets Google wants to see, like images and videos, is practically marketing 101. If you’re a Korean recipe site and want to be associated with the kimchi jjigae entity, wouldn’t you already know you need to make a video and have photos of the cooking process?
When I started my breakdance site years ago, I knew nothing about SEO and content marketing but I still knew I needed to make YouTube videos. Because guess what? It’s hard to learn breakdancing from words. I don’t think I needed an entity SEO to tell me that.
Topical authority is an SEO concept where a website aims to become the go-to authority on one or more topics. Call me crazy, but it feels like blogging 101. Read most guides on how to start a blog and I’m sure you’ll find a subheading called “niche down”. And once you niche down, it’s inevitable you’ll create content surrounding that one topic.
If I start a breakdance site, what are the chances I’ll write about contemporary dance or pop art? Pretty low.
In fact, topical authority is similar to the Wiki Strategy, which Nat Eliason wrote about in 2017. There wasn’t a single mention of entities. It was just the right way to make content for the Internet.
I think the biggest problem here isn’t entities versus keywords or that topical authority is a brand-new strategy. It’s simply that many SEOs are driven by short-sightedness or the wrong incentives.
You can target a whole bunch of unrelated keywords that have high search volume, gain incredible amounts of search traffic, and brag about how successful you are as an SEO.
Some of the pages sending HubSpot the most search traffic has barely anything to do with their core product. A page on how to type the shrug emoji? The most famous quotes?
This is not to single out HubSpot—I’m sure they have their reasons, as explored by Ryan here—but to illustrate that many companies do the exact same thing. And when Google stops rewarding this behavior, all of a sudden companies realise they do need to write about their core competencies. They need to “build topical authority”.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater because I do see value in the last two ‘entity SEO tactics’. But again, if you’re doing something similar to the Wiki Strategy for your site, chances are you would have naturally included entities or semantically relevant words without thinking too much about it. It’s difficult to create content about kimchi jjigae without mentioning kimchi, pork, or gochujang.
However, to prevent the curse of knowledge or simply to avoid blindspots, checking for important subtopics you might have missed is useful. At Ahrefs, we run a page-level content gap analysis and look out for subtopics:
For example, if we ran a content gap analysis on “inbound marketing” for the top three ranking pages, we see that we might need to include these subtopics:
- What is inbound marketing
- Inbound marketing strategy
- Inbound marketing examples
- Inbound marketing tools
Finally, adding schema markup makes the most sense because it’s how Google recognizes entities and better understands the content of web pages. But if it’s just one new tactic—which I believe is already part of ‘standard’ SEO and you might already be doing it—then there’s no need to create a category to define the “new era” (voice SEO, where art thou?)
Final thoughts
Two years ago, someone on Reddit asked for an SEO workflow that utilized super advanced SEO methodologies:
The top answer: None of the above.
When our Chief Marketing Officer Tim Soulo tweeted about this Reddit thread, he got similar replies too:
And even though I don’t know him, this is a person after my own heart:
You don’t have to worry about entity SEO. If you have passion for a topic and are creating high-quality content that fulfills what people are looking for, then you’re likely already doing “entity SEO”.
Just follow this meme: Make stuff people like.
SEO
Assigning The Right Conversion Values To Make Value-Based Bidding Work For Lead Gen
Last week, we tackled setting your data strategy for value-based bidding.
The next key is to assign the right values for the conversion actions that are important to your business.
We know this step is often seen as trickier for lead gen-focused businesses than, say, ecommerce businesses.
How much is a whitepaper download, newsletter signup, or online quote request worth to your business? While you may not have exact figures, that’s OK. What you do know is they aren’t all valued equally.
Check out the quick 2-minute video in our series below, and then keep reading as we dive deeper into assigning conversion values to optimize your value-based bidding strategy.
Understanding Conversion Values
First, let’s get on the same page about what “conversion value” means.
A conversion refers to a desired action taken by a user, such as filling out a lead form, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter.
Conversion value is simply a numerical representation of how much each of these conversions is worth to your business.
Estimating The Value Of Each Conversion
Ideally, you’d have a precise understanding of how much revenue each conversion generates.
However, we understand that this is not always feasible.
In such cases, it’s perfectly acceptable to use “proxy values” – estimations that align with your business priorities.
The important thing is to ensure that these proxy values reflect the relative importance of different conversions to your business.
For example, a whitepaper download may indicate less “value” than a product demo registration based on what you understand about your past customer acquisition efforts.
Establishing Proxy Values
Let’s explore some scenarios to illustrate how you might establish proxy values.
Take the event florist example mentioned in the video. You’ve seen that clients who provide larger guest counts or budgets in their online quote requests tend to result in more lucrative events.
Knowing this, you can assign higher proxy values to these leads compared to those with smaller guest counts or budgets.
Similarly, if you’re an auto insurance advertiser, you might leverage your existing lead scoring system as a basis for proxy values. Leads with higher scores, indicating a greater likelihood of a sale, would naturally be assigned higher values.
You don’t need to have exact value figures to make value-based bidding effective. Work with your sales and finance teams to help identify the key factors that influence lead quality and value.
This will help you understand which conversion actions indicate a higher likelihood of becoming a customer – and even which actions indicate the likelihood of becoming a higher-value customer for your business.
Sharing Conversion Values With Google Ads
Once you’ve determined the proxy values for your conversion actions, you’ll need to share that information with Google Ads. This enables the system to prioritize actions that drive the most value for your business.
To do this, go to the Summary tab on the Conversions page (under the Goals icon) in your account. From there, you can edit your conversion actions settings to input the value for each. More here.
As I noted in the last episode, strive for daily uploads of your conversion data, if possible, to ensure Google Ads has the most up-to-date information by connecting your sources via Google Ads Data Manager or the Google Ads API.
Fine-Tuning With Conversion Value Rules
To add another layer of precision, you can utilize conversion value rules.
Conversion value rules allow you to adjust the value assigned to a conversion based on specific attributes or conditions that aren’t already indicated in your account. For example, you may have different margins for different types of customers.
Instead of every lead form submission having the same static value you’ve assigned, you can tell Google Ads which leads are more valuable to your business based on three factors:
- Location: You might adjust conversion values based on the geographical location of the user. For example, if users in a particular region tend to convert at a higher rate or generate more revenue.
- Audience: You can tailor conversion values based on specific audience segments, such as first-party data or Google audience lists.
- Device: Consider adjusting conversion values based on the device the user is using. Perhaps users on mobile devices convert at a higher rate – you could increase their conversion value to reflect that.
When implementing these rules, your value-based bidding strategies (maximize conversion value with an optional target ROAS) will take them into account and optimize accordingly.
Conversion value rules can be set at the account or campaign levels. They are supported in Search, Shopping, Display, and Performance Max campaigns.
Google Ads will prioritize showing your ads to users predicted to be more likely to generate those leads you value more.
Conversion Value Rules And Reporting
These rules also impact how you report conversion value in your account.
For example, you may value a lead at $5, but know that these leads from Californian users are typically worth twice as much. With conversion value rules, you could specify this, and Google Ads would multiply values for users from California by two and report that accordingly in the conversion volume column in your account.
Additionally, you can segment your conversion value rules in Campaigns reporting to see the impact by selecting Conversions, then Value rule adjustment.
There are three segment options:
- Original value (rule applied): Total original value of conversions, which then had a value rule applied.
- Original value (no rule applied): Total recorded value of conversions that did not have a value rule applied.
- Audience, Location, Device, or No Condition: The net adjustment when value rules were applied.
You can add the conversion value rules column to your reporting as well. These columns are called “All value adjustment” and “Value adjustment.”
Also note that reporting for conversion value rules applies to all conversions, not just the ones in the ‘conversions’ column.
Conversion Value Rule Considerations
You can also create more complex rules by combining conditions.
For example, if you observe that users from Texas who have also subscribed to your newsletter are exceptionally valuable, you could create a rule that increases their conversion value even further.
When using conversion value rules, keep in mind:
- Start Simple: Begin by implementing a few basic conversion value rules based on your most critical lead attributes.
- Additive Nature of Rules: Conversion value rules are additive. If multiple rules apply to the same user, their effects will be combined.
- Impact on Reporting: The same adjusted value that’s determined at bidding time is also used for reporting.
- Regular Review for Adjustment: As your business evolves and you gather more data, revisit your conversion values and rules to ensure they remain aligned with your goals.
Putting The Pieces Together
Assigning the right values to your conversions is a crucial step in maximizing the effectiveness of your value-based bidding strategies.
By providing Google Ads with accurate and nuanced conversion data, you empower the system to make smarter decisions, optimize your bids, and ultimately drive more valuable outcomes for your business.
Up next, we’ll talk about determining which bid strategy is right for you. Stay tuned!
More resources:
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
SEO
Expert Embedding Techniques for SEO Success
AI Overviews are here, and they’re making a big impact in the world of SEO. Are you up to speed on how to maximize their impact?
Watch on-demand as we dive into the fascinating world of Google AI Overviews and their functionality, exploring the concept of embeddings and demystifying the complex processes behind them.
We covered which measures play a crucial role in how Google AI assesses the relevance of different pieces of content, helping to rank and select the most pertinent information for AI-generated responses.
You’ll see:
- An understanding of the technical side of embeddings & how they work, enabling efficient information retrieval and comparison.
- Insights into AI Content curation, including the criteria and algorithms used to rank and choose the most relevant snippets for AI-generated overviews.
- A visualization of the step-by-step process of how AI overviews are constructed, with a clear perspective on the decision-making process behind AI-generated content.
With Scott Stouffer from Market Brew, we explored their AI Overviews Visualizer, a tool that deconstructs AI Overviews and provides an inside look at how Snippets and AI Overviews are curated.
If you’re looking to clarify misconceptions around AI, or looking to face the challenge of optimizing your own content for the AI Overview revolution, then be sure to watch this webinar.
View the slides below, or check out the full presentation for all the details.
Join Us For Our Next Webinar!
[Expert Panel] How Agencies Leverage AI Tools To Drive ROI
Join us as we discuss the importance of AI to your performance as an agency or small business, and how you can use it successfully.
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