Case Study: Google Search Ads vs. Facebook Ads for a Small Local Business

For small businesses with limited budget, it can be hard to decide how to distribute your advertising budget. Money is tight, and a lack of time is often a problem.

Worse still is when you’re a new business fighting for visibility in the search results.

My client Kerry’s Fresh, a local business offering fruit and veg delivery, wanted to increase their online presence, but also wanted to reach their financial targets. We had a hypothesis that Google search ads would be the better platform to capture leads compared to Facebook advertising. However, we were also interested in the additional value that could be gained from Facebook advertising, such as Facebook page likes and brand awareness.

In this case study, we will explore whether it’s worth investing in both search ads and Facebook ads for a small local business like this.

Note that these platforms are very different in nature, and a like-for-like campaign is not possible, but we’ll still attempt to compare costs and results.

The Scenario

The data we will be looking at is over six months, from 1st April – 30th September 2017.

The objective for both platforms was to gain website transactions. For our Google search ads, we focused on keywords with high intent. As this is not possible on Facebook, we set careful audience targeting based on customer personas, to show our ads to users who were most likely to convert. This targeting strategy was paired with engaging product images and calls to action.

For the search ads, we ran many campaigns, aimed at B2B and B2C users. Yet, on Facebook we focused on the B2C audience and continued to improve and update the Facebook ads frequently, so that they didn’t become stale.

Example of a Facebook ad from the Kerry’s Fresh campaign

The landing page used for both platforms was the same, as we designed a landing page with paid search in mind, which had minimal steps to complete a conversion.

Kerry’s Fresh landing page

The Results

When comparing the results of search ads and Facebook ads, we can conclude that for new businesses, paid search ads are the best way to spend their budget in the short term.

Google search: The pros

The data shows that it was 72% cheaper to gain a transaction with Google search ads than Facebook ads. The search ads had a much lower average Cost Per Acquisition of £30.72 over a six-month period; this is far lower than the CPA for Facebook ads, where we saw a very high CPA of £109.

*Conversions for Facebook were all online transactions. For AdWords, one conversion was from a phone call, the others were transactions.

Yet, when comparing all transactions from Facebook over the six-month period, the CPA is reduced to £23.30, and Facebook shows to be the most cost-effective platform, as the CPA was 24% cheaper than Google search ads.

Facebook ads: The pros

Without the investment in Facebook ads, boosted posts and competitions this low CPA would not have been achieved. From Facebook ad manager, we can see that running Facebook ads played a significant role in growing their Facebook presence.

During this period, the client’s Facebook page gained over 460 new ‘likes.’ With the addition of boosted posts and running a Facebook competition, the client gained nearly 200 shares and 6,177 link clicks to their website. We found that as the Facebook audience increased over time, so did the online transactions.

Google search vs. Facebook ads costs

When comparing CPC, the average cost per click for Facebook was 71% cheaper than Google search ads. With many competitors fighting for the same keywords in the SERPs, the average cost per click was £1.22 over a six-month period. Yet when targeting B2B phrases, the CPC was £2.06 for the average position of 2.6 in the search results.

One of the main differences between the campaigns was the spend. During this period, we spent less on search ads due to low search volume. Yet, Facebook would continue to spend the daily budget due to the nature of Facebook ad delivery and targeting settings.

Here you could argue that search ads are more cost effective, as Google Search ads will only spend the budget when keyword requirements have been met, yet Facebook continued to use the full daily budget if the audience requirements were met.

Conclusion

As mentioned previously, it’s hard to compare like for like campaigns between Google search ads and Facebook ads. Also, results may vary widely depending on your industry and business type. Yet, when we do compare Google search ads to Facebook ads for this particular client, the search ad campaigns were more cost-effective.

However, it’s important to consider the impact that the Facebook ads had on the overall success of the client’s Facebook performance.

WordStream has found that businesses running Facebook ads get more organic page fans

Even though Facebook ads proved to have an expensive CPA for this client, I would not ignore the overall impact and brand awareness that can be achieved using the platform. We were able to reach more people who weren’t actively searching for relevant terms.

I recommend that SME’s invest the time and effort into Facebook, and consistently post and share content to develop their brand and online presence.

By testing and trialling both Facebook and search ads as part of the marketing mix, you can find what works best for you. I would also suggest having patience when it comes to social media advertising – the more you grow your following, the more success you’ll have.

Learn more about the differences between these two platforms here.

About the author

Lauren Ahluwalia is a Digital Marketing Consultant at Hallam Internet, offering paid social advertising. Lauren is one of eight social media trainers for Facebook’s ‘She Means Business’ campaign, which aims to train 10,000 female entrepreneurs.

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5 Content Promotion Strategies to Drive More Traffic While Writing Less

The prescribed recipe for success in today’s content marketing game looks a little like this: write as many mid-to-high-quality blogs for as many targeted keywords as possible. Write at a breakneck pace, and write your competitors under the table. Challenge the Klingons for interstellar domination. That kind of thing. 

It’s all very noisy; and, as it turns out, occasionally ineffectual. Even if you control all your content for quality and originality, writing for quantity can be an easy way to sink your site’s search visibility. Why? There reaches a point of diminishing returns. Duplicate content comes into play. Multiple blogs begin to challenge one another for the same keywords. That piece you wrote about how Napster had a timeless platform, and was going to change music forever, didn’t age well, wasn’t de-indexed, and is now awfully cumbersome for Google to crawl.

Content marketers in the habit of working smart while their competitors work hard take their work-promoted-to-work-produced ratio seriously; one, notably, to the tune of 80:20. From a manhour standpoint, that’s a full day spent finding creative ways to promote a blog that took two hours to write. That might sound like an aggressive time commitment, and for your purposes, it might be.

The goal of today’s blog is to give you some creative ways to spend the time you’ve allocated to content promotion. Your goal should be to find the ratio that nets you the best return on your work.

Data shows companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get almost 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish 0-4 posts per month.

Image via HubSpot

If your blog is on the newer side, therefore, and your content budget is low, your ratio might look more like 20:80—you’ll be spending most of your time building your cache of quality content.

If your blog has been around for several years, on the other hand, some of the below strategies are worth considering. It’s time to get more traffic from the content you’ve already created.

Let’s hop in!

1. Embrace Video for Social Media Promotion

Video marketing is projected to account for more than 80% of all internet traffic by 2019. The state of video marketing in 2017 is comparable to that of content marketing in the mid-2000s—companies understand the importance of incorporating video into their strategy, many just aren’t sure how to go about doing so. The landscape is underdeveloped and ripe for cultivation. A Fertile Crescent of yet-realized-content, if you will.

Per HubSpot, almost 50% of marketers are adding YouTube and Facebook channels for video distribution in the next year.

Image via HubSpot

Today, you have companies like Wistia SEO-ifying transcripts (embedding your descriptions in metadata for a more streamlined on-page experience); and you have access to free tools like Lumen5, which make it easier than ever to create compelling videos with virtually no talent.

By way of example, I used Lumen5 to create an introductory promo to one of our recent blog posts, “14 Fun & Festive Holiday Marketing Ideas for 2017.”

 

Here are two snapshots: our best performing tweet in which we used the Lumen5 video, followed by our best performing tweet in which we used a standard gif.

 

16 more engagements: not the worst! And all it took was a few snippets of copy from our blog’s introduction and a few light-hearted gifs.

Based on the nature of your content, you might decide that a summary works better than a teaser. Perhaps you haven’t invested much in your visual design team, and you decide to turn the camera around on some choice members of your marketing team (think Whiteboard Fridays).

Longer, more informative videos have a benefit of their own—a valuable piece of video content is more likely to generate shares than, say, a teaser; it’s more likely to drive traffic to your YouTube or Vimeo channel; and it’s more likely to be of lasting value for your brand.

That said, comprehensive social videos can discourage the need to click through to the blog you’re marketing. If blog traffic and on-page conversions are your bottom line, incorporating short, fun promos into your social strategy (particularly in Instagram stories, if you have the ability to link-in-story) might be a worthy experiment.

2. Ditch Headlines on Social

A sad and tasteless creation. By yours truly.

If a theme begins to emerge in this post, I hope it’s this: Don’t do vigorously and with abandon that which you can do deliberately and with care. Not that writing a million blogs and tweeting 10 tweets with the same headline isn’t its own kind of deliberate. But it is, I’d like to think, a less sustainable kind.

You need look no further for a social account that “does it right,” in my opinion, than SEMrush’s Twitter account. What do I mean by doing it right? They rarely waste copy space on throwaway headlines. Check out the below two tweets:

Which blog got less engagement? The second one. Despite being all industry-leading, and stuff. My theory? It’s because more effort went into the teaser copy; they didn’t just copy and paste the headline.

Actually, mixing in a few standard headlines is totally fine in moderation. The problem for most social managers is that they’re low on time, they lean on their bulk schedulers, they’re spread thinly across several responsibilities, and on top of it all, J Crew Factory is 50% off site-wide and practically giving away those v-neck sweaters that display just the right amount of chest follicle. What’s an optimized marketer to do?

Get more human! Comb through your content for three or four snippets of text you can use as social copy. Statistics perform well, as do quotes from influencers. Perhaps your author had a sexy line in the introduction.

Whatever you choose to go with, the idea is to treat your social posts like ads. Pretend you’re paying for them. You’ll take better care of them, and you’ll turn off less followers in the process.

3. Experiment with Influencer Marketing

When companies pay social influencers to market their products, they’re paying for credibility. They’re buying the trust of an audience they wouldn’t otherwise have had access to. They’re skipping hours of targeting, exposure, and nurturing.

Per DemandGen, 87% of B2B buyers give more credence to industry influencer content. The ramifications of that statistic go beyond having the ability to create effective Twitter copy, though.

When you take the time to reach out to an influencer for a quote before you write your piece—or even if you just quote a line from one of her blogs or videos and cite the source—you put yourself in a position to receive exposure on her platform once your content goes live.

Perhaps she retweets your post on Twitter. Perhaps she’s flattered by the mention, or takes a liking to your content, and decides to link to you in a future post. Whatever the case, you’ve put your content in a position to thrive in a wholly new environment. And we’re not talking Vader-mug thrive.

This is valuable content we’re talking about!

The one constant in all this is outreach. There are several tools you can use to gauge a person’s “social influence”—Followerwonk comes to mind—and once you’ve identified the big players in your market (you probably already know them), you can proceed to send out emails. Do this before you write your blog (to acquire quotes) or after (to tell them you mentioned them). In fact, it’s a good idea to experiment with both.

Take a look back at any statistics, studies, companies, or people I’ve mentioned thus far. These are all opportunities to expand the promotion strategy for this post.

4. Set Aside Some Budget for Paid Promotion

An advertisement about advertisements.

There are plenty of unpaid options worth exploring before you start paying for blog traffic. That said, if you have the budget, paid promotion—in particular paid social—is the fastest way to get your content in front of qualified readers. Because you control audience creation, you get to deliver your blogs all neat and pristine-like to your ideal readers’ social feeds.

A favorite strategy of ours here at WordStream is to serve our most evergreen blog posts—the posts that have accumulated the most traffic over the longest periods of time—to people that have visited our blog in the past 30 days. It gives us the opportunity to build brand loyalty while providing readers with content tailored to their past consumption.

We have other audiences too, though—created based on interests, behaviors, locations, ages, and genders—and for our efforts, we usually average out at around $0.12 per blog visit ($0.14 for Facebook, $0.10 for Twitter). Here is an inside look at one of our Twitter audiences:

The first image shows you some of the Twitter handles we target (this is called follower targeting) in this specific ad group; the second, some of the locations. We also targeted men ages 25-54. Follower targeting is a particularly useful feature for audience creation because it allows you to target the followers of users closely tied to your business. Not sure what those are? Twitter tells you!

Now, $0.12 per blog visit is a relatively low cost across both platforms—the average cost per click (CPC) of Facebook Ads in the business-to-business sphere is $2.52.

But again, if your blog is on the newer side, you might not have much budget to devote to promotion. If that’s the case, you may want to make friends with the other four promotion methods on this list.

For more on paid promotion in its various forms, Quick Sprout put together a solid guide here.

5. Leave High-Value, Non-Spammy Comments

If you like guys in suits, you’ll love our thing!

Comment sections are a great place to show authenticity, because there’s so very little of it. They’re dominated by spam links, robots, pent up consumer vitriol, and introductions to the Illuminati. A relevant, valuable resource, offered in earnest, is a miracle. 

You can be that miracle! The consensus among internet folk seems to be that, if it is your first time contributing to the comment section of a given blog, it’s best to leave out the link to your resource and merely offer an opinion. Then another opinion. Then, when you’ve convinced your fellow opiners you have legs, a pulse, and a valid perspective, you can lay the hammer—that great piece of relevant content—right on ‘em.

There are blogs—blogs that attract a lot of meaningful commentary—for which I think this is true. That said, there are also tons of blogs whose comment moderators are so inundated with crap that they’d be relieved to offer your gem of a resource a share, a link, endless praise, what have you. Here’s an example of a good comment from a recent post of ours about AdWords budget changes.

A genuinely useful script for budget pacing.

Not only did Nils earn a perky response from our perennially surly author:

He was a unanimous selection for Comment of the Week in our team’s Slack chain (prestigious), and he also earned an unsolicited mention in this post. Good on ya, Nils!

The takeaway: be genuine, find blogs that might actually benefit from your resource, and don’t hesitate to comment liberally.

Some Thoughts…

If the theme I mentioned earlier hasn’t come fully to the fore, allow me to continue to force it on you: so much of content promotion is about marketing like a human. Narrow the scope of your work and be deliberate about who you place your content in front of. Before you move on to that next targeted keyword, reward the time you spent crafting your last piece of content by putting it in a position to thrive.  

About the Author

Gordon Donnelly is a college hockey washout, failed poet, and all-around oxford comma enthusiast. He’s a sucker for: fly fishing, mudslides, and the dwindling half-light of Clery’s basement. Tweet him @gord_donnelly.

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How to Do a Competitor Analysis for SEO

Posted by John.Reinesch

Competitive analysis is a key aspect when in the beginning stages of an SEO campaign. Far too often, I see organizations skip this important step and get right into keyword mapping, optimizing content, or link building. But understanding who our competitors are and seeing where they stand can lead to a far more comprehensive understanding of what our goals should be and reveal gaps or blind spots.

By the end of this analysis, you will understand who is winning organic visibility in the industry, what keywords are valuable, and which backlink strategies are working best, all of which can then be utilized to gain and grow your own site’s organic traffic.

Why competitive analysis is important

SEO competitive analysis is critical because it gives data about which tactics are working in the industry we are in and what we will need to do to start improving our keyword rankings. The insights gained from this analysis help us understand which tasks we should prioritize and it shapes the way we build out our campaigns. By seeing where our competitors are strongest and weakest, we can determine how difficult it will be to outperform them and the amount of resources that it will take to do so.

Identify your competitors

The first step in this process is determining who are the top four competitors that we want to use for this analysis. I like to use a mixture of direct business competitors (typically provided by my clients) and online search competitors, which can differ from whom a business identifies as their main competitors. Usually, this discrepancy is due to local business competitors versus those who are paying for online search ads. While your client may be concerned about the similar business down the street, their actual online competitor may be a business from a neighboring town or another state.

To find search competitors, I simply enter my own domain name into SEMrush, scroll down to the “Organic Competitors” section, and click “View Full Report.”

The main metrics I use to help me choose competitors are common keywords and total traffic. Once I’ve chosen my competitors for analysis, I open up the Google Sheets Competitor Analysis Template to the “Audit Data” tab and fill in the names and URLs of my competitors in rows 2 and 3.

Use the Google Sheets Competitor Analysis Template

A clear, defined process is critical not only for getting repeated results, but to scale efforts as you start doing this for multiple clients. We created our Competitor Analysis Template so that we can follow a strategic process and focus more on analyzing the results rather than figuring out what to look for anew each time.

In the Google Sheets Template, I’ve provided you with the data points that we’ll be collecting, the tools you’ll need to do so, and then bucketed the metrics based on similar themes. The data we’re trying to collect relates to SEO metrics like domain authority, how much traffic the competition is getting, which keywords are driving that traffic, and the depth of competitors’ backlink profiles. I have built in a few heatmaps for key metrics to help you visualize who’s the strongest at a glance.

This template is meant to serve as a base that you can alter depending on your client’s specific needs and which metrics you feel are the most actionable or relevant.

Backlink gap analysis

A backlink gap analysis aims to tell us which websites are linking to our competitors, but not to us. This is vital data because it allows us to close the gap between our competitors’ backlink profiles and start boosting our own ranking authority by getting links from websites that already link to competitors. Websites that link to multiple competitors (especially when it is more than three competitors) have a much higher success rate for us when we start reaching out to them and creating content for guest posts.

In order to generate this report, you need to head over to the Moz Open Site Explorer tool and input the first competitor’s domain name. Next, click “Linking Domains” on the left side navigation and then click “Request CSV” to get the needed data.

Next, head to the SEO Competitor Analysis Template, select the “Backlink Import – Competitor 1” tab, and paste in the content of the CSV file. It should look like this:

Repeat this process for competitors 2–4 and then for your own website in the corresponding tabs marked in red.

Once you have all your data in the correct import tabs, the “Backlink Gap Analysis” report tab will populate. The result is a highly actionable report that shows where your competitors are getting their backlinks from, which ones they share in common, and which ones you don’t currently have.

It’s also a good practice to hide all of the “Import” tabs marked in red after you paste the data into them, so the final report has a cleaner look. To do this, just right-click on the tabs and select “Hide Sheet,” so the report only shows the tabs marked in blue and green.

For our clients, we typically gain a few backlinks at the beginning of an SEO campaign just from this data alone. It also serves as a long-term guide for link building in the months to come as getting links from high-authority sites takes time and resources. The main benefit is that we have a starting point full of low-hanging fruit from which to base our initial outreach.

Keyword gap analysis

Keyword gap analysis is the process of determining which keywords your competitors rank well for that your own website does not. From there, we reverse-engineer why the competition is ranking well and then look at how we can also rank for those keywords. Often, it could be reworking metadata, adjusting site architecture, revamping an existing piece of content, creating a brand-new piece of content specific to a theme of keywords, or building links to your content containing these desirable keywords.

To create this report, a similar process as the backlink gap analysis one is followed; only the data source changes. Go to SEMrush again and input your first competitor’s domain name. Then, click on the “Organic Research” positions report in the left-side navigation menu and click on “Export” on the right.

Once you download the CSV file, paste the content into the “Keyword Import – Competitor 1” tab and then repeat the process for competitors 2–4 and your own website.

The final report will now populate on the “Keyword Gap Analysis” tab marked in green. It should look like the one below:

This data gives us a starting point to build out complex keyword mapping strategy documents that set the tone for our client campaigns. Rather than just starting keyword research by guessing what we think is relevant, we have hundreds of keywords to start with that we know are relevant to the industry. Our keyword research process then aims to dive deeper into these topics to determine the type of content needed to rank well.

This report also helps drive our editorial calendar, since we often find keywords and topics where we need to create new content to compete with our competitors. We take this a step further during our content planning process, analyzing the content the competitors have created that is already ranking well and using that as a base to figure out how we can do it better. We try to take some of the best ideas from all of the competitors ranking well to then make a more complete resource on the topic.

Using key insights from the audit to drive your SEO strategy

It is critically important to not just create this report, but also to start taking action based on the data that you have collected. On the first tab of the spreadsheet template, we write in insights from our analysis and then use those insights to drive our campaign strategy.

Some examples of typical insights from this document would be the average number of referring domains that our competitors have and how that relates to our own backlink profile. If we are ahead of our competitors regarding backlinks, content creation might be the focal point of the campaign. If we are behind our competitors in regards to backlinks, we know that we need to start a link building campaign as soon as possible.

Another insight we gain is which competitors are most aggressive in PPC and which keywords they are bidding on. Often, the keywords that they are bidding on have high commercial intent and would be great keywords to target organically and provide a lift to our conversions.

Start implementing competitive analyses into your workflow

Competitive analyses for SEO are not something that should be overlooked when planning a digital marketing strategy. This process can help you strategically build unique and complex SEO campaigns based on readily available data and the demand of your market. This analysis will instantly put you ahead of competitors who are following cookie-cutter SEO programs and not diving deep into their industry. Start implementing this process as soon as you can and adjust it based on what is important to your own business or client’s business.

Don’t forget to make a copy of the spreadsheet template here:

Get the Competitive Analysis Template

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What’s the Deal with Quora Ads? How-To + Case Study

The way we ask and answer questions in 2017 is fundamentally different than at any other point in human history.

 

Today, we’ll run through what Quora is, how to advertise on the platform, and what we experienced when we ran Quora ads for WordStream.

What is Quora?

Quora is a publicly mediated Q and A forum that relies on a system of upvotes and community contributions to serve insightful answers to inquisitive searchers. Like a kind of Jeopardy meets Reddit meets Wikipedia Cerberus, if you will. Or a more authoritative version of Yahoo Answers.

 

Most people (at least in my polling of folks around the WordStream office) don’t explicitly navigate to Quora. Instead—as is often the case with Wikipedia—links to the site tend to pop up in the organic search results (making it an important albeit underutilized part of any site’s SEO strategy).

This is particularly true when a search is framed as a question, which, thanks to the proliferation of voice search, is becoming more common. Per Quora, the site currently has over 200 million unique monthly visitors and recently expanded to support Spanish and French.

While this is all well and good (everyone can stand to benefit from a resource this rich), it doesn’t necessarily mean you should move a portion of your advertising budget over to what is, for all intents and purposes, a very fancy message board, right?

Hold that thought.

Why advertise on Quora?

Quora is unique in that it offers advertisers the ability to build credibility in the eyes of a prospect during the hella important research phase.

 

While an informational keyword in AdWords might give you the power to serve a relevant ad to a searcher, there’s only value to be had if you can incite a click with your copy. Quora, on the other hand, gives you the ability to couch your ad copy between insightful nuggets of information that relate—directly or tangentially—to your product or service. While on a SERP your ad is positioned atop links to relevant websites, Quora ads are dispersed betwixt actual information, like so:

 

If a prospect is searching for information about your company, product, competitors, or industry, Quora presents you with a unique opportunity to slide between insightful responses (bonus brand equity points if your team contributed ‘em) with a contextually relevant ad closely resembling what you’d see over on AdWords.

In the example above, which depicts the results for “What is the best Facebook campaign strategy I can use for an online clothing store,” there’s an ad for General Assembly’s part-time digital marketing course. The nontraditional educator is attempting to use Quora ads to teach a man to fish, so to speak. I dig it.

Quora says Quora offers advertisers…

• A large, engaged audience
• Quality content
• High user intent
• Measurability

The GA example I just touched on supports the first few claims. Someone looking to bolster the performance of their Facebook ads is clearly engaged. The ad itself is sandwiched between insightful responses the likely served to educate the searcher. User intent is clear.

While I whole-heartedly agree with the first three points, I’m ready and willing to quibble with the “measurability” bit. This isn’t for lack of effort but, rather, newness. Facebook, a comparatively old ad platform, is only just affording advertisers functional, actionable measurability (provided they implement the Facebook Pixel). If Quora continues to innovate on this front (and offer more robust targeting, because we could always use more robust targeting) its ad platform will quickly become a staple for online marketers.

With that, let’s jump into setting up your very first Quora ad.

How do Quora Ads Work?

If you’ve dipped your toes into the PPC waters at some point, the process of creating, managing, and optimizing a Quora ads account will feel familiar to you.

So, without further ado…

Creating a Quora Account

Visit the “Advertising on Quora” page and click the big, blue start now button:

 

From there, you’ll be instructed to create an account name and enter your business and contact information. Standard procedure. Once everything looks kosher, click “create account.”

Installing the Quora pixel

Without the ability to measure success—or lack thereof—online advertising is frivolous. You may as well buy ad space on the placemats at a truck stop on 95.

As such, it’s imperative that you install the Quora Pixel on your website. This will allow you to do two things: track conversion events and build remarketing audiences.

While I’m not going to go into too much detail about the latter (structurally, remarketing audiences in Quora are built based on whether a given URL has been visited by a prospect), conversion tracking is key.

To place the Quora pixel on your website, press “Quora Pixel” in the nav bar.

 

From there, click “Setup the Pixel.” It’s a funny little grey button on the righthand side of the screen. This will cause an overlay, which outlines pixel installation, to appear. All you need to do here is copy the Javascript in the overlay and paste it between the <head></head> tags of every page of your site (or at least the ones you’re sending traffic to).

If the existence of greater than/less than symbols outside of freshman algebra makes you queasy, send the Javascript for your Quora pixel over to your web developer. It shouldn’t take them more than a few seconds to implement it on your site.

Creating a Quora Ads Campaign

As is the case with Facebook ad account structure, the campaign level is a shell that holds ad groups. It’s the place where objectives, budgeting, and ad scheduling are controlled. Ad sets, on the other hand, are where the magic happens. 

When you click “+Create Campaign,” you’ll be brought to a screen that looks like this:

 

Unfortunately(!) Quora is yet to implement my helpful commentary. Be sure you select “Conversions” as your objective. If you’d rather establish a lifetime budget and an ad schedule (a la Facebook) than set a daily max in perpetuity, do so, click continue, and we’re on to the ad set level.

Ad Set: Targeting & Bidding

As I mentioned earlier, the ad set level is the most important unit of your Quora ads campaign. It’s where you control who sees your ads. Without investing some serious time into honing your targeting (keywords, locations, and negatives), you’re going to undermine the platform’s inherent, intent-centric value.

The first stage in ad set creation is (shocker) coming up with a name. Ensure that you use common nomenclature throughout so that you know what’s going on in a given ad set without having to rifle through its innards (by this I simply mean that naming an ad set “ALLEN ROXXX” is silly when you could call it “US-Content DL-Startups” or something).

 

Once you’ve named your ad set, scroll down to the “Primary Targeting” section. Quora offers two levels of targeting, primary and secondary. The former allows you to select between two options:

• Topic Targeting – In which topics function like keywords, allowing you to select the sorts of questions among whose answers your ads are served.
• Audience Targeting – In which the Quora pixel allows you to select segments of site visitors and target prospects when they inevitably return to Quora.

 

Since this is your first rodeo, you’re going to want to stick with Topic Targeting. Ensure that the box as highlighted (as it is above) and move on down to the actual topic selection interface.

Quora actually recommends you enter keywords from an AdWords campaign in order to receive suggestions for comparable Quora topics (love synergy).

 

Just dump your keywords into this box and press continue; this will generate a list of prospective Quora topics that you can advertise on.

Confused? How ‘bout an example?

Let’s say I enter “Facebook business page” into the box and hit continue. Quora generates the following list of suggested topics:

 

From here, I can sort through the list, selecting or unselecting. If we (WordStream) wanted to convey specific, independent messages regarding Facebook and AdWords, I’d eliminate “Google AdWords” from this list of topics, uncheck any other riffraff, and import the refined list of topics into my ad set. Now we can move onto secondary targeting.

The secondary targeting section of the ad set creation interface allows you, the advertiser, to adjust the scope of your efforts. Here, you can control for location (the geographic regions in which users can see your ads) and platforms (desktop or mobile). But that most interesting component of Quora’s second tier of targeting is its exclusion function.

 

Exclusions in Quora function like negative keywords on the Google Search Network. If you want people in the United States to see your ads but would prefer to hide them from our neighbors to the north, this is where you’d denote that.

Once you’ve defined your audience, simply set a maximum bid for the ad set and move on to ad creation.

Anatomy of a Quora Ad

Quora ads look a lot like text ads in AdWords.

 

The biggest difference, outside of character count and capitalization (Quora ads should be written like sentences Instead Of In Title Case Like People Tend To Use When Writing Search Ads), is that Quora ads have a pretty cool dynamic CTA button. It pulls your display URL, appending it to one of a dozen or so phrases—“shop now,” free trial,” etc.—to create a compelling call to action that stands out.

The constituent components of a Quora ad are as follows:

• Business Name – 30 characters
• Headline Sentence – 65 characters
• Body Text – 105 characters
• Display URL – 30 Characters

In context, those components look like this (albeit with less compelling copy):

 

As is the case with any advertisement, you should try to write an attention-grabbing headline, and support whatever assertion you make by addressing the benefits of your product or service in the body section.

From there, you just need to select the most pertinent CTA button, ensure your landing page is in working order (and you’ve got the pixel in place), and you’re ready to launch.

Measuring Performance

Quora Ads uses a CPC-based model powered by a real-time auction (just like, you know, most of the other online advertising platforms). This means that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

But, outside of conversions, how do you know if your ads are resonating with your audience?

Why, with Quora’s built-in reporting features, of course!

Though rudimentary—currently, you can only view impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, conversion rate, and spend—Quora can give you a pretty good idea as to the relative success of your efforts at both the campaign and ad set levels.

So, Do Quora Ads Work? [Case Study]

In August, we decided to try Quora ads out for 30 days.

During that time, we drove 1,135 clicks on 230,604 impressions (these are, like, Display-comparable figures at best). Of those clicks, 23 downloaded a piece of content and another 20 ran the AdWords Performance Grader. 

This indicates that our top and mid-funnel campaigns seemed to perform similarly (though through the implementation of Audience Targeting, we could probably offer something more valuable to attain better results moving forward, thanks to an even greater understanding of user intent).

 

From a CPA perspective, qualified leads on Quora were about 17% more expensive than AdWords, but 31% cheaper than we saw on Taboola and 19% cheaper than we saw on Capterra. We’ve discontinued our experiments on both other platforms because the ROI simply wasn’t there; Quora, on the other hand, is still alive and kicking.

I reached out to Aaron Doherty, WordStream’s Director of Lead Acquisition, who shared the following insights: “I like Quora a lot. It’s a new source of intent. While AdWords is still the best source of high-intent leads, Quora is in the same ballpark. The fact that the content is user-generated, with answers occurring in real time makes it an exciting place for marketers. While we haven’t quite tapped into Quora’s full potential, I’m excited to continue advertising on the network in 2018 and beyond.”

When I followed up to see if he had any negative experiences with Quora, Aaron had a single response: “The UI sucks. It’s worse than Twitter circa 2014.”

Final Thoughts

While our results to date haven’t been perfect, they have been promising.

Quora offers a ton of potential as a complementary ad network. If you’ve got discretionary ad budget to tool around with, give it a go. If you’re still in the process of building out your AdWords, Facebook, and Bing accounts, wait a few quarters.

Who knows: by that time, Quora ads might have a killer new UI and enough targeting options to take your online advertising to the next level.

About the Author

Allen Finn is a content marketing specialist at WordStream. He enjoys couth menswear, dank eats, and the dulcet tones of the Wu-Tang Clan.

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