If you’ve ever considered social media or search advertising as part of your digital marketing strategy, you’ve most likely spent a considerable amount of your budgets on Facebook and/or Google Ads. Maybe even LinkedIn, too.
And you’ve probably experienced promising successes, along with disheartening failures. Perhaps you’ve even exhausted your efforts on two of the most common advertising platforms in the world.
But have you considered all of your options?
Every day, your target audience is looking for answers to commonly asked questions. Beyond bidding on long-tail keywords in Google, how can you get in front of the people asking the questions that you have the answers to?
Insert Quora advertising. Expand your digital marketing strategy. Strike gold (potentially).
What is Quora?
Quora is a social Q&A website where questions are asked, answered, edited, and organized by its community. The website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010, with iOS and Android apps supporting its growth in the two years following its launch.
Today, Quora is just eight years old (at the time this post was written) and attracts over 600 million visits a month from users all around the world, putting it in the top 100 most popular websites. The Android app itself has over 354,000 downloads!
This enormous amount of traffic presents millions of opportunities for businesses to make an impression on their target audience on a platform that many competitors may have never considered.
Insert Quora advertising. Stay ahead of your competitors. Strike gold (potentially).
Uncovering Gold with Quora advertising
Okay, so you might be asking: How did Quora get to be this big? And where’s this gold you speak of?
Well, think about it: What’s one of the first things people do when they have a question? They Google it. And Google always has the answer.
Since Quora’s platform is chock-full of answers to questions, it makes it easy for Google to rank the site at the top of SERPs for thousands of question-based queries.
And now that Google is increasingly rewarding quality content with featured snippets and knowledge boxes, Quora will gain even more traffic from organic search engines.
Insert Quora advertising. Get your digital pickaxe out. Strike gold (potentially).
Quora Ad examples: What Do They Look Like?
Quora offers two types of ads that blend right in with organic posts on the platform: a text-only ad and an image ad with text. Both of these types of ads can appear on the website via desktop or on the mobile app.
All ads are marked with “Promoted by” or “Sponsored by” so users know when they are clicking on an ad. But otherwise, Quora ads look and feel like a natural part of the platform, so it’s less likely that users will habitually ignore them like they do with more obvious ads on other sites.
Quora Ad Examples
Image ad on the app
In terms of real estate on the platform, bold headlines are limited to 65 characters, and you’re allowed up to 105 characters for the description that appears below your headline. Following the description is an array of different calls to action, giving advertisers the ability to promote anything from a blog post to a free trial or even a mobile app download.
Headlines must end with a period or question mark, which helps to organically blend the ads into the platform and make them appear as yet another question posed by a “user.” This policy encourages advertisers to get creative with their ad copy—it’s likely that the headlines you use on Facebook or other platforms may not work on Quora.
As an advertiser and user, I adore Quora for their strict ad policies. The long list of dos and don’ts are enforced to ensure that both advertisers and users have a great experience on the platform.
For users, this means you may be able to find exactly what you’re looking for thanks to a tasteful, perfectly placed ad that doesn’t scream at you in all caps and mislead you to a landing page that doesn’t line up with what the ad was promoting.
For advertisers, this means we can expect better performance in terms of the sheer number of clicks and the rate at which we get them.
Insert Quora advertising. Get your copywriting fingers ready. Strike gold (potentially).
What Is Quora’s Advertising Cost?
Each advertiser will experience different performance with Quora ads depending on a number of factors, including but not limited to:
- Your audience.
- The bids you set.
- The quality of your ad copy.
- The quality of your landing page experience.
I won’t get too specific with Quora ads pricing. But while advertising blog content from a company that sells digital marketing software, I’ve seen click-through rates from 0.5% to 2.5% and costs per click from $0.50 to $2.50.
The only way to find out how much advertising on Quora will cost for your business is to try it out.
Insert Quora advertising. Set a budget you’re comfortable with. Strike gold (potentially).
How to Advertise on Quora in 3 Easy Steps
- Set up your Quora for Business account
To get started, you’ll need to head over to quora.com/business. Like on Facebook, in order to advertise on Quora, you’ll have to create your personal Quora account. And once that’s set up, you can log in and begin building your ads.
- Define your campaign objective capabilities
Building a Quora ad campaign, much as any other, starts with defining your objective. Awareness, traffic, conversions, and app installs are the four options available that will give the Quora algorithm a hint as to how to best serve your ads. This is where you’ll determine the budget of your campaign (lifetime or daily) and how long the campaign runs.
- Define your audience targeting capabilities
You can target as broad as you’d like. If you’re a larger brand looking to gain awareness, use broad targeting to get your message out to the masses. Or, if you don’t have an endless marketing budget, target your audience by specific topics and interests.
If you’re targeting by topic, your ads will appear next to content associated with specific topics across Quora. Alternatively, they may appear in topic placements without a specific context, like in Quora’s feed.
If you’re targeting by interest, your ads will behaviorally target individuals who show interest in specific topics across Quora.
Beyond those capabilities, you can either promote your ad on a specific question that gets a lot of traffic or promote an answer to a question that gets asked often. Some Quora questions get a lot of traffic because they rank well organically on search engines. You can see estimated weekly views per question to decide which ones are worth targeting.
The final (and potentially the most successful) targeting ability that I strongly recommend using if you consider advertising on Quora is remarketing. In the Quora ad manager, this is referred to as audience targeting. Take advantage of Quora’s pixel to target users by specifying certain pages of your site that they have visited in the past.
Insert Quora advertising. Find your target audience. Strike gold (potentially).
Analyzing Your Audience Beyond the Click
So you’ve got people to click on your ads, driving them to your site or mobile app. Now we’re talking!
But wait—that’s just the beginning of determining how successful your efforts are on Quora.
Just like on any other platform, tracking is going to be a crucial part of advertising on Quora. You must append UTM tags (Urchin Tracking Module) to your destination URLs. If you don’t have UTMs in place, you’ll just see traffic come through Google Analytics as “quora.com / referral.”
UTMs give you the ability to determine which campaign, audience, or ad users clicked on to get to your site. UTMs are a no-brainer for collecting more specific insights into which ads and campaigns are performing best and converting.
Don’t know where to begin with UTMs? Start here.
Considering Quora for Business? Here are My Tips:
Do your research!
Get on Quora. Make an account. Download the app. Be a user for a day. Tell Quora you’re interested in topics that relate to your business or your client’s business, and see if any competitors are already using Quora to their advantage—you’ll know if they are once you see the ads being served to you based on your interests. No competitors? Perfect!
Read the ad policies!
Before you write one line of copy, read the ad policies. Trust me on this one! It’ll save you a lot of time and headaches when you’re getting emails for disapproved ads left and right and aren’t sure what you did wrong.
Analyze your audience!
Use UTMs to understand what the traffic is doing once users get to your site by doing a deep dive into Google Analytics. Don’t judge the success of a campaign based on just your CTR—the metrics in the Quora ad manager don’t always tell the full story.
Run a test. Test some more. Oh, and test again!
Don’t restrict your targeting to remarketing. Try prospecting by running a test between topics and interests. Test advertising on a question.
Don’t copy and paste your headlines from Facebook. Well, you can—just don’t expect the same results. Get creative and test different questions, statements, and calls to action. Remember: The audience on Quora may not react to the ad copy you use on other platforms.
Don’t just run a campaign targeting both devices—test mobile vs. desktop. Dedicate a campaign’s budget to desktop only while promoting the same content offer with the same budget in a mobile-only campaign. Compare the performance of the ads against the traffic that clicks through to determine which device yields a greater return.
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t immediately strike gold on your first campaign—keep testing!
(Did I mention you should test your ads?)
Conclusion
If you’re looking to try a new platform as part of your digital marketing strategy, Quora advertising may be a goldmine in your tool belt of ad platforms.
If you’ve exhausted your efforts on Facebook, Google Ads, and other major platforms you’ve stumbled upon, Quora may be the godsend you’ve been looking for all along.
Insert Quora advertising. Try something new. Strike gold.