Inspired by a great post by Vaidhyanathan, I began answering questions on Yahoo! Answers near the beginning of this year. Since then I have answered over 50 questions, nearly always related to metal roofing. Nearly 12 months later I sat down and did a study to find out:

Was the time I was spending answering these questions resulting in a reasonable amount of usable leads?

On to the data:

From my 53 answers, I received 562 visits, with a bounce rate of 33.5%, spending an average of 3:03 per visit.

First I compared the conversion rates of Yahoo! Answers traffic with PPC rates from the same period:

(Conversions are either a customer filling out and submitting a form for more information, or clicking on a link to our contact page.)Data this chart was made from is available as an Excel spreadsheet here.

As you can see, the conversion rates from Yahoo! Answers are nowhere near those coming from our PPC campaigns. That being said, to accurately understand how much this traffic is worth, you need to find out the cost of this traffic per visitor.

This data is available as an interactive Excel spreadsheet here.

The conversion rates for traffic from Yahoo! Answers are lower than those of PPC traffic, but the cost per visit is less. So to accurately compare them, we do some more number crunching:

(For privacy reasons I unfortunately can't give you all the PPC data I would like to.)

So basically, for Best Buy Metals, it makes sense to continue spending time answering questions on Yahoo! Answers.

Important tip:

Don't rush out to Yahoo! Answers and answer every question with a link to your website at the end!

Answer relevant questions in a non-spammy relevant way. Then include your website as a source at the end. You are the source, as a representative of your company, so this is not deceptive, and people don't mind it. You can check out my Yahoo Answers profile here.

Coming soon... How to use Yahoo! Answers in a way that benefits your company and the Yahoo! Answers community - The complete guide.