What is Quora and Could Advertising on Quora Work For You?

Quora was founded back in 2010 and has gained a reputation as a respected, community-driven Q&A engine. Quora is one of the largest free online communities for user-generated questions and answers. Like many sites, Quora uses advertising to generate revenue. Depending on your audience and goals, advertising on Quora could be a great option to consider. In this post, we will explore what Quora is and the opportunity they offer to advertisers.

Quora can best be classified as:

• An online collaborative information sharing and learning platform
• A platform that connects the information needs of real people with information solutions provided by real people
  

Advantages of Advertising on Quora

To stay on top of potential customers and when it comes to sales, you can’t rely on just one touchpoint. To embrace several touchpoints with potential customers, it is important to consider channels other than Google or social media. There are a lot of reasons why we would recommend advertising on Quora, including:

• 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
• 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
• An inexpensive advertising platform – Considering the platform is still relatively new, advertising is usually more affordable compared to Google and Facebook

Overview of the Quora Ad Types and Placements

• Drive Consideration – Promoted Answers:

• Capture Demand – Text and Image Ad Units:

• Quora Ad Placements:

Quora Advertising Targeting Options

There are many different targeting options to choose from including:

• Contextual Targeting – Show ads related to specific topics, keywords or questions includes:
  • Topic Targeting – Targets topics relevant to your business to reach the people who are reading questions related to those topics
  • Keyword Targeting – Provide a list of keywords that are relevant to your product and service. Target questions that match the keywords provided
  • Question Targeting – Target your ad to show up on specific question pages of your choice

• Audience Targeting – Show ads to audiences that match website traffic, lookalikes, or contact lists includes:
  • Website Traffic audience – Create an audience based on visitors to your website and retarget them
  • Lookalike audience – Create an audience based on an audience you have already leveraged in the Quora Ads manager
  • List Match audience – Create an audience based on a list of uploaded email addresses

• Behavioral Targeting – Show ads to users based on interests or retarget them based on question history includes:
  • Interest Targeting – Target users who have demonstrated recent engagement (such as questions read, upvotes etc.) with certain topics.
  • Keyword History Targeting – Retarget users who’ve previously read questions comprising targeted keywords in the past (max duration 30 days)
  • Question History Targeting – Retarget users who have visited specific questions in the past (max duration 30 days)

• Broad Targeting – Show ads widely across Quora to maximize potential impressions.
  • With Broad Targeting, Quora will automatically target your ad across the Quora audience depending on their location and device. Broad Targeting can be used to generate traffic to a website and build brand awareness

Bidding Effectively on Quora Advertising

Quora has three bidding options:

• Cost per Click (CPC) Bidding 
  • Optimize your ad delivery for traffic to your website or landing page.
  • Only get charged with a user clicks on your ad
  • Amount charged will vary based on the bids of the advertisers participating in the auction
• Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) Bidding
  • Optimize your ad delivery to show your ad to as many people as possible
  • Charged on an impression basis, regardless of the clicks
  • CPM bid reflects the maximum amount you are willing to pay to generate 1000 ad impressions
• Target Cost Per Action (CPA) bidding 
  • Optimize your ad delivery for conversions
  • Show ads to people who are most likely to take the conversion action you want them to take
  • Quora manages the bids of your account and attempts to have the account convert at or below your target cost per lead

Is Your Audience on Quora?

It’s worth taking the time to research whether your audience can be found on Quora. You may be a bit skeptical about it and we often hear resistance due to concern that the target audience isn’t on Quora. If you haven’t spent much time on the site itself, you may not be aware of the wide variety of users that you can reach.

Adding the Quora pixel to your site is an easy way to help evaluate whether you should be on the platform. Installing the Quora pixel on your website allows us to create an audience from your website visitors. Then, by looking at the audience data, we can determine whether or not Quora ads are right for you.

Another option is to upload a customer list to generate a list match audience of Quora users. To see if your current customers already use the platform, you can upload a hashed, privacy-compliant CSV file to Quora with your customer or prospect email addresses and create an audience that way. If the list match is high, you may be able to determine that many of your customers are already using Quora.

Conclusion

In the world of PPC, recommending new channels to test can sometimes be a not-so-fun obstacle course to navigate. Many times, businesses think they need to max out Google and Facebook before expanding to other channels. But expanding and testing other channels is more important than you think as it allows you to capitalize on opportunities that your competitors may not have considered.

Overall, Quora is 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 Google Ads. If you’re looking for some help implementing Quora or other niche digital channels to your campaigns, feel free to reach out!