Quora Advertising: Is it Right for Your Digital Advertising Strategy?

Have you ever heard of quora advertising? Do you even know you can advertise with quora?

With Facebook coming under scrutiny for unsavory data collection practices, advertisers are scrambling to find new paid mediums for their products.

Being that Facebook Ads and AdWords are the largest platforms in terms of sheer spend volume on Earth, it makes sense to continue using them as your major campaign drivers. But, as most smart marketers know, it’s best to stay up-to-date with the latest, innovative offerings for paid digital traffic.

Welcome, Native ad platforms – one of my personal favorite campaign types – have increased market share with bigger players like Outbrain, Revcontent and Taboola competing for your digital ad budgets.

Within this article, I am going to show you when to consider Quora advertising as part of your digital strategy.

Statistics and Facts about Quora Advertising

What is Quora, you ask? Well, according to founder Adam D’Angelo , the site can be classified as:

• Quora is an online collaborative information sharing and learning platform.
• Quora is an online engineering platform that connects the information needs of real people with information solutions provided by real people.
• Quora is an expanding, continuously improving, democratically ranked resource library that contains ‘bite’ sized nodules of highly contextualized learning.

Quora was founded circa 2010 and has gained a solid reputation as a good community driven Q&A engine. They’ve built a network of “experts,” essentially crowd sourcing the best answers to questions.

Quora’s user statistics are rather impressive – more than 200 million users currently inhabit the site. That places the new guy between Pinterest and Twitter in terms of size.

They’ve also launched Spanish and French language versions with German and Italian to follow, so you have an idea of the traffic origins.

Quora is a search engine, not a social network. That’s an important distinction.

With Google being the search engine of all search engines, seeing that it ranks Quora content so highly is a good sign. Search intent is key in this business, and without a clear pathway back to the users’ needs, digital campaigns would not stand a chance.

Quora for Business launched in 2016 but only in a closed beta for a few select advertisers. This new rollout will allow advertisers to get the jump on the competition and see how the platform works with real-world offers.

I believe Quora could prove to be a decent platform, but it has a way to go and it most likely will never be a serious competitor to the big boys. But I do believe it can be a solid performer to bring you a good stream of additional, quality acquisitions.

So, in the absence of much hard data, let’s take a look at the mechanics ….  a look under the hood to determine what potential it offers and how easy it is to use.

How does Quora Advertising Work?

Quora is all about two things: Questions and Answers.

Quora ads is an amazing platform to get in front of your potential customers during the awareness and traffic generation stages of your marketing funnel. It can help you build authority on topics, trends, drive traffic to your site, and ultimately, help improve your website conversions.

With Quora’s self-service ad platform, advertisers can create native, text-based ads, targeting users by interest, geography, or platform (mobile, desktop, or both).

Your text ads will show up under the main question like the sample as shown above.

Quora ads are only available on an auction basis, meaning they require advertisers to specify a bid value they are willing to pay for a click. It is the same concept as Google or Facebook pay per click. Budgets can be as low as just a few dollars as there is no minimum spend required to get started.

Advantages of Advertising on Quora?

There are a lot of reasons why we would recommend advertising on Quora and below are just a few:

1. High User Intent – Users demonstrate high intent and longer time on site based on the content they are reading. Quora offers a variety of question topics to target with ads so you can reach the right users at the right time with your message.
2. Quora results often come up in Google search results – If you use Quora correctly, it can become a valuable traffic driver to your website or blog.
3. An inexpensive advertising platform – Considering they are still new, advertising cost is affordable compared to Google and Facebook. It is not cheap , average is about $6 on some topics but if you are in B2B, this cost is nothing.

Quora Advertising Platform Review

Below, I’ve detailed my first foray into Quora Ads. I give my honest opinion, based on my experience within the paid digital realm.

Interface: So-so for a new platform. It reminds me of early versions of Facebook Ads Manager – before the merger with Power Editor. The workflow is intuitive and easy to navigate, even for the most novice of media buyers.

Campaigns: Currently they offer two options: Conversions or App Installs.

There is a conversion pixel for — again, very similar to Facebook — helping those of us who live on data to keep tabs on our KPIs. Under the ‘Conversion Pixel’ tab in the top navigation bar there’s a section called ‘Recent Views on the Pixel,’ which shows you the Referrer URLs where the conversion pixel fired in the last 15 minutes. This is super handy to help ensure that conversion tracking is working properly in the account.

Quora Targeting Options

Decent for such a new platform. They offer a pixel that allows you to remarket to your own website traffic. Otherwise the targeting is using topics, similar to broad match keywords on AdWords. (As seen below). They have a tool which allows you to find additional topics to expand your potential reach. They also have location targeting by country, city or regions.

The potential reach looked good for the U.S. targeting I tested. It was significantly lower in a few other locations, but I would expect this to grow.

Expanded Targeting (Stolen from Quora’s website)

List match audiences can help improve your Quora ads’ performance in a number of ways. For example:

Target existing leads: If you have a list of leads or another high-value segment, you can create a List Match Audience based on those email addresses and specifically target that audience using Quora Ads. This could be useful if you want to provide a special offer to that high-value audience alone.

Exclude existing customers from campaigns: For example, you might want to exclude existing customers from your ads on Quora. To do this, put all of your current customers’ email addresses into a List Match Audience segment. Add this audience as an exclusion for all of your demand generation campaigns. By excluding existing customers from your ads on Quora, you can further improve the ROI of your spend on Quora.

Expand target segments: You can create a Lookalike Audience from a List Match Audience to further expand your target audience on Quora. Create a List Match Audience based on your current most valuable customers, then create a Lookalike Audience based on that audience.

These options are, again, very close to what you will find on Facebook and AdWords; those two platforms have set the standard for targeting within digital advertising.

Budgets and Ad Cost: CPC bids are not cheap, often upwards of $6 range for many topics. If you target only mobile, it can lower those suggested bids drastically. Per usual, U.S. traffic is the highest, with descending values as you move across the globe.

FYI: South American and African bid ranges were approximately one-fourth that of the United States. Those markets – think: Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria – could be a gold-mine for advertisers looking to sell internationally.

Device Targeting: Desktop or mobile options. Pretty standard.

If you’re feeling risky, you can choose both.

Reporting: Not bad, considering the limits on traffic compared to larger players. You do not have the ability (yet) to view traffic breakdown by topics. Bummer.

Ad Types: Text ads with content length restrictions.

• Business name: Maximum of 30 characters
• Headline sentence: Maximum of 65 characters
• Body text: Maximum of 105 characters
• CTA: 1 of 16 encompassing the most popular offers
• Display URL: Maximum of 30 characters

Conversion Tracking: You have the option to choose a URL or event-based conversion for your campaigns.

Scaling Campaigns: At the present, the platform does not offer enough traffic to create an effective increase in your campaign’s performance. Again, this platform will not serve as your major driver for conversions.

Overall Performance: With only a small budget to play with, the conversions were solid; however, if you’re looking to scale with Quora, I would not bet the farm just yet.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Quora offers a solid offering for advertisers looking to promote a niche product. At the present time, the platform will not handle the lion’s share of your advertising budget, but it can serve as a nice supplement for traffic and conversions outside of the chaos that lurks within Facebook Ads and AdWords.