An Interesting Finding on Pinterest & Quora
Hey everyone.
It's been nearly 3 months since I joined WA, so I'm currently in the foundational stage where I'm trying different methods to bring traffic to my website.
Like many other WA members, I've been putting consistent effort into two methods in particular: Pinterest and Quora.
More than once, I saw Partha say that you should think of every platform you use to bring traffic to your website as a discipline in its own right.
You need to spend some time on that platform to gain experience and exposure until you're well-versed with the nitty gritty of the platform, and the working principles of its algorithm.
Toward that end, I have an interesting finding I thought I'd share with you all.
I'm sure that the relatively new members can benefit greatly from this, but perhaps many of you reading this are far more experienced than me in both platforms, so it may be that you already know what I'm about to share.
In any case, think of this blog post as a case study to cement your understanding of what you may or may not already know.
Pinterest Finding
Here's a picture of my impressions over the last two months on Pinterest.
See the two peaks I circled in red? There is one thing that those two days have in common:
On those two days, I created boards and saved a few pins from other people in them.
I didn't do that except on those two days.
What conclusions can we draw from this?
Pinterest seems to reward you if you actively engage with the community.
We use Pinterest to promote our blogs, so most of us probably have a number of boards we've filled with our own pins, and that's fine.
However, the more you show the algorithm that you're an actual member who's engaging with pins, saving them, and perhaps liking and commenting on them, the more the algorithm seems to value you as an organic member, and this can reflect in showing your pins to more people.
It may be reasonable to suggest that my impressions have been on a general increase, so the second peak isn't really indicative of anything.
However, as you can see in the image, my first peak definitely stands out.
Quora Finding
I also had a very similar experience in Quora.
Here's a picture of a detailed answer I gave to a question:
Of course, that's not the full answer — it was much longer and contained several images.
What I wanted to show you is that this answer got around 700 views in one day.
Here's another one of my answers:
Again, this is not the full answer — it also had many images and an in-depth explanation.
This answer got 860 views and 3 upvotes in a few days.
Now then, let's take a look at this answer:
5 views. Just 5.
It's been many days since I wrote this answer, and it's very obvious that Quora is deliberately not showing it to many people.
Why are they doing that? I mean, this answer has a very similar amount of detail and thoroughness, so why the huge difference between this answer and the previous two?
Well, those with a keen eye will have probably noticed that this answer contains a link — a subtle link that I included to one of my posts.
Previously, I tried answering many questions by writing a few lines and then directing the asker to an article on my website where I discuss the topic in detail, but all these answers barely got any views.
So this time, I thought I'd include a subtle link, maybe Quora wouldn't really punish me for it.
As you can see, that didn't work at all.
What conclusions can we draw from this?
Quora seems to reward you if you act like a normal member of the community.
This is very similar to the Pinterest finding.
We all know that our sole objective of joining those platforms is to promote our websites and grow our traffic, but the more we act like normal members of the community who are genuinely interested in helping, the more Quora will reward us by showing our answers to more people.
Using Quora to get traffic to your website is a long game.
At an early stage, putting links in your answers won't do the job, even if the article you're linking to is actually very relevant and does a great job at answering the question.
The focus in Quora is to be as helpful as possible, perhaps grow your following a little bit, until people are interested in finding out more about you.
If you have your website or some of your best articles linked in your bio, then there's a chance you will attract some visitors from Quora.
Main Takeaway
This is the take-home message of this blog post:
Every platform you use to direct traffic to your website appreciates you acting like an organic member of the community, and they show this appreciation by showing your content to more people.
Of course, it's still early days for me to see tangible success, so I'm still far from being an experienced member in these platforms.
However, I still think that this finding can help a lot of people.
Yusuf
Recent Comments
29
Very interesting finds indeed Yusuf!
I have not personally used Pinterest or Quora much, but... I do indeed to in the not too distant future!
Appreciate the info my friend and enjoy the rest of your weekend! :-)
Thank YOU my friend! I have certainly learnt a lot from reading through all of the comments here!!
👍😀
I agree with you, Yusuf.
Of course, we still have to research the popularity of our topic and use keywords, hashtags, etc., depending on the platform, its rules, and the ranking algorithm.
Frank 🎸
Glad you agree Frank.
You're right, there are many other factors that go into it, I just wanted to share my findings regarding the organic engagement factor.
Great insight Yusuf,
Always interesting to learn from what others have found and thanks for sharing, i haven't starting engaging with Pinterest much yet but my plan is to start during the xmas holiday time off from work.
Any advice on a good starting point?
Regards
Pete
You're very welcome Pete.
Jay (magistudios) has started a brand new Pinterest series this December. I think that's an excellent starting point.
I have the link to Jays Pinterest series saved, the initial video is 57 minutes long so plan on watching it at the end of the week when i finish work for xmas :-)
I wouldn't be a little hesitant with those two appearances - I'm not saying to be an organic user on whatever platform you are on, however in both these instances, you're showing impressions, and not actual site views. It would be interested to see your outbound click stats for Pinterest to actually compare if you received more outbound clicks during those two spikes you see.
To be fair though, I literally just checked my Quora stats, and found what you showed to be fairly accurate, strangely enough. Every question I answered that had a link in it had significantly less views than all the rest. Need to go check how much traffic I'm actually getting from them though.
Hmm, I appreciate your insights, Andy, but I disagree with you.
Outbound clicks are completely irrelevant within the context of my blog post.
Yes, outbound clicks are definitely always the end goal, but when it comes to the platform rewarding you vs punishing you, the relevant metric here is impressions — whether the platform is showing your content to many people or not.
Outbound clicks are the user's decision, not the platform's. It boils down to whether or not your pins are enticing enough for those who see your pin to be tempted to go to your article.
If you're not getting enough impressions, then of course you won't get many outbound clicks, because people aren't even seeing your content, let alone going to your website.
I'm glad you agree with my Quora finding though.
On Pinterest, impressions is the same as views: how many times your pin has appeared within someone's feed or search results.
Pin clicks are the number of times someone has clicked on your pin to have a closer look.
Outbound clicks are the number of times someone has clicked through to your website which you have linked in your pin.
LOL, well, - for the sake of quibbling, I'm gonna quibble. So I don't mean any of this below in any disrespect, and you don't seem like the type of guy who gets offended, but I'm going to respectfully disagree to your disagreement, haha (Please note, when I use all CAPS, it is not in the form of yelling - I just can't underline/italize/bold any of the text, so this is the best I can do to draw emphasis to certain words/phrases).
Okay, first things first. Let's just talk primarily about Pinterest and (general) impressions.
Let's talk about Pinterest first: I run multiple sites online, and two of those sites get MILLIONS of impressions. That's all in regard to my wife - she's the Pinterest guru in our business. (Screenshot below to prove it.)
The two main things that I have issues with what you said with Pinterest ("Pinterest seems to reward you if you actively engage with the community.") is:
1. You're drawing a conclusion based on two spikes in impressions. But you don't dive deeper into the analytics of those days, and SEE where the impressions are even going to. Are they going towards the boards that you created? Or are they going to your pins?
Also, (and I'm going to assume that you've been consistently pinning through out this time), but couldn't I draw the conclusion that PINTEREST SEEMS TO REWARD YOU IF YOU CONSISTENTLY PIN DAY-BY-DAY?
If the analytics suggest that your impressions went up because of creating boards, then great - do a 6-day case study, where each day you create a new board (and add your own/other peoples pins to it), and see what the results are after that.
2. You start your sentence with "Pinterest SEEMS to reward you....". No offense, but what does Pinterest actually say to do so that they will reward you? My wife has never once told me "we're going to do XYZ on Pinterest because it seems like XYZ is working". She always tells me "We're going to do XYZ because Pinterest says to do XYZ". Like, she literally tells me that - just yesterday she shared about how Pinterest tells us that they want us (business/creators) to help their users move from INSPIRATION to REALIZATION.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying don't dive deep into your analytics and see what's going on. Pinterest has trends, and using them to your full potential is essential (yo, that jingle rhymes, lol. I like it...). But please be careful in saying it looks like you get rewarded when Pinterest never said that.
(NOTE: once again, I'm not necessarily saying that your statement is wrong - like I said, that's my wife's department, and so when she's up from her nap I can ask her if Pinterest has ever said they reward people based on actively engaging with the community. Maybe they have. I just haven't personally heard my wife say anything for or against that. So I personally don't know).
(EDIT: the wifey woke up, and hasn't heard of Pinterest saying anything like that - if the people you are engaging with sharing your pins, then sure that might help, but Pinterest itself isn't necessarily going to reward you just because you are actively engaging with the 'community'. But she's welcome to look into it if you find something that suggests otherwise.)
Okay, now let's move on and talk about IMPRESSIONS.
You said "the relevant metric here is impressions — whether the platform is showing your content to many people or not."
Yes, and no.
I agree that impressions are a good metric for whether or not you are ranking. But that doesn't mean that your are ranking WELL and/or all of your impressions are because Pinterest/Google/Search Engines are rewarding you.
Outbound clicks aren't "completely irrelevant within the context of [your] blog post".
Let me try to explain.
Impressions are just showing you that as you've been indexed by a search engine for certain keywords that you are trying to target and they've added you to their search results.
But just because you're getting impressions doesn't really mean that you're doing anything well and/or that the search engine is rewarding you.
For example, if you take a look at the second/third screenshot I've provided, it's for a site that we launched earlier. It has about 20 posts on it (and the last time I actually published something was probably back in October).
You'll notices that over the last three months I've gotten a pretty good increase in impressions. However, you'll also notice that my average position is around 60.
What's really interesting is that my actual position has been going DOWN (instead of up) as my impressions has been rising.
So, can I really say that, based off of my increase in impressions, I can confidently say that Google is rewarding me, when clearly my average position is dropping?
I don't think that I/you can, without deeper analysis.
Now here's another one of my sites (screenshot four), where my impressions have been consistent with my traffic and average position. Here I think we both can say with confidence that, yes, Google is indeed rewarding me.
ADDITIONALLY, when you bundle your impressions up all together, you can't really tell whether or not you are ranking well ACROSS THE BOARD.
Look at screenshot 5 - in just 24 hours, we got 36K impressions to one of our Pinterest accounts. Does that suggest that we're doing well, and that Pinterest is rewarding us?
Not necessarily.
You see if you look at screenshot 6, you'll notice that we actually just have a viral pin right now, and so that's where the majority of our impressions are coming from. So I can't ASSUME that Pinterest is rewarding me across the board, since the reality is that because SOMEONE ELSE AND NOT PINTEREST re-shared my pin, and that is partly why I'm getting so many impressions (Yes, Pinterest is ranking me well for it now, but it was initially because people have been consistently re-sharing it).
And last but not least, if you take a look at (hopefully my last) 7th screenshot, you'll see that our Pinterest impressions have been consistently going down (for this one Pinterest account).
Oh, horrors! (insert screaming emoji). Does that mean that my wife/business knows nothing about Pinterest and that Pinterest isn't rewarding us?
Absolutely not. This viral pin is seasonal, and so if you actually look at the analytics, and break down of each of the pins we have, we're actually doing better ACROSS THE BOARD because all of our other pins are ranking better than where they originally were.
And if you'll allow me to say one more thing (something that you already know, but others may not) - If you don't have outbound clicks (or, in Pinterest's case, saves or pin clicks), then, Pinterest is going to take away those impressions and give them to someone else, who has something of value that users will click on, save and/or click through.
On top of this, if your NOT GETTING ANY CLICKS WHEN THINGS RANK WELL, then Pinterest (or any other search engine) isn't going to give you more impressions - it's actually going to stop ranking you well, because it sees that your content has no value.
So, in essence, you need engagement for Pinterest to reward you with more impressions/engagement. They sort of work hand in hand.
Anyways, I've been working on this for close to three hours, so if you got this far, good. I apologize if I went off on a few side tangents, but hopefully, the point of what I was saying made it through.
Thank you very much for putting hours of your time into this.
I definitely wasn't offended, and you probably noticed that I made it very clear on many occasions in my blog post that I'm nowhere near an expert, just someone who's sharing their personal findings in hopes of them being helpful to other people.
I'm aware that you're seeing great success in Pinterest, and it's an amazing opportunity for me to learn from your experience.
Kudos to Mrs. Calvin — big name in the Pinterest field!
Now that I know that a controversial post can draw a 3-hour response from you, I'll do more of them. 😂
I'm just joking, but again, I really appreciate your insights.
(1) Okay, regarding your first point of whether the conclusion should be that Pinterest seems to reward you if you consistently pin day-by day, I actually somewhat proactively answered this in my post:
"It may be reasonable to suggest that my impressions have been on a general increase, so the second peak isn't really indicative of anything. However, as you can see in the image, my first peak definitely stands out."
In other words, if the increase in impressions was due to my consistent pinning, then you would expect it to continue to be around the same after the first peak — why the massive drop?
Now, two peaks may indeed be too few to draw any conclusions in the grand scheme of things.
I actually talked to Diane about this and she said it may be worth investigating, so a case study seems like the way to go to confirm this.
(2) You're right, the way to go is to follow the platform's concrete instructions for best practices, and I have been trying to increase my best Pinterest practices to some extent — of course, I'm still in the early learning phase.
So far, I've only noticed two things:
(A) What I said in this blog post, which I appreciate your challenge of.
(B) Pins aimed at "beginners" seem to do better. I heard Jay say this in one of his classes, but again, it's a conscious decision to choose the word "seem" because I don't want it to sound like I'm 100% positive of this finding after years of experience.
Yes, I'm aware that some pins are seasonal, so a drop in impressions doesn't necessarily signify Pinterest punishing you.
I'm also aware that lumping impressions together may be misleading, as the source of the majority may be from one or two big-hit ones.
Having said that, in my humble case, I'm only getting regular impressions on my pins — I have no followers, no viral pins, and no one is resharing my pins.
It's true that my account is so small that observations may be practically useless for someone like you, but if you think about it, sometimes, looking at a clean slate with a fresh pair of eyes can perhaps provide some insights.
The main takeaway for me from your comment is that Pinterest rewards your success with more success.
This makes sense. It's not like they want to do you a favour, it's just because pins that do well are better for them, so those are the sort of pins they want to show to more and more people.
Thanks once again.
See more comments
Thank you for sharing your experience and insights about using Quora to drive traffic to your website! 🙌 It's interesting to hear about your observations and the differences in visibility between answers with and without links. 🤔
Indeed, many platforms appreciate genuine engagement and contributions to the community. By providing valuable and helpful answers, you can establish yourself as a trusted and knowledgeable member, which can ultimately lead to increased visibility and potential traffic to your website. 🌟
Building a presence on platforms like Quora takes time and consistent effort. It's important to focus on providing value, building relationships, and demonstrating expertise in your field. As you continue to contribute and engage with the community, there's a higher chance of attracting visitors to your website through your bio or other relevant opportunities. 🚀
Thank you for sharing your main takeaway, which emphasizes the importance of acting like an organic member of the community on various platforms. It's a valuable lesson for anyone looking to leverage these platforms to drive traffic and grow their online presence. 🌼
Best of luck with your continued efforts on Quora and other platforms! Keep up the great work! 💪😊
Thank you ChatGPT!
welcome yusufky hehehe