The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Quora Advertising

Quora is slowly becoming a serious marketing tool for many business looking to reach their target audiences with digital ads.

When thinking about digital advertising, the first ad platforms that come to mind are most likely Google and Facebook. These tech giants have two of the most powerful digital ad solutions in the world, but that doesn’t mean you should be placing all of your eggs in one—or two—basket(s).

Google and Facebook have billions of users, which is why these two can be so effective for many advertisers. However, plenty of alternative ad platforms are proving quite useful for engaging users at opportune moments to turn them into qualified leads.

One such alternative is Quora, the Internet’s largest question and answer website.

Here’s a look at why Quora Ads are worth your time and a few tips you can use to launch a successful campaign.

What is Quora?

After launching in 2009, Quora has become the leading Q&A platform where users can get answers to questions that Google Search may not be able to provide—although Quora pages do show up in Google results. Users can submit or answer questions posted by other members in the community.

Quora has over 190 million monthly users, and Alexa ranks it, but according to Alexa, it’s the 93rd most popular website in the world.

If you’ve never used Quora before, here’s an infographic from Neil Patel which provides a little detail about how people use the site:

What distinguishes Quora from other Q&A sites is that the answers tend to be high-quality. Users will often pour in a lot of thought and personal insights when answering questions.

For example, if you were curious about what Vietnam War veterans experienced when they returned home, you are likely to get answers from actual veterans who were there.

Roughly 6,000 questions are posted every day on Quora, and users tend to leave rich, meaningful answers. Some users even go so far as writing answers with images, charts, high word counts, and links to external resources.

Because of the level of quality users bring to the site, Quora is one of the most common websites with top rankings in Google Search.

In our previous post, we discussed that Google’s number one priority is satisfying user intent. For people who ask direct questions, an answer found on Quora can serve as the best solution to solving certain user queries.

The next time you perform a few manual searches, try to notice how many times Quora has one or multiple questions on the first page of Google.

Why Should You Use Quora Advertising?

The Quora Ads platform is unique in that it gives you the opportunity to place your ads between insightful pieces of information that are related to your products or service. With traditional search engines, your ads appear above search results, while on Quora they are positioned in between user answers.

Here’s a question someone asked about improving employee engagement:

With over 100 answers, it’s likely that a lot of users are engaged with this question while others have meaningful experiences and knowledge to share.

In between the first and second answer is an ad for Niko, an employee engagement platform:

Quora Ads potentially have more relevance in the exact moment people are searching for answers. Coupled with the site’s high traffic numbers, Quora Ads can be a practical and effective tool for digital marketers.

Just keep in mind that there is no “magic bullet” when it comes to digital marketing. There’s no clear way to tell how Quora will work for you until you give it a whirl.

Creating Your First Quora Advertising Campaign

We were early adopters of Quora Ads, and we want to share a couple of things we learned along the way.

Here’s what the process looks like to get your first Quora ads off the ground.

Installing the Conversion Pixel

Once you’ve poked around the ads interface, the first step is to set up the Quora conversion tracking pixel. To set this up, log into your Quora account and navigate to the Quora pixel tab which you can find in the top navigation menu.

You will then click on the “set up pixel” button in the upper right. Once clicked, you will see a popup that contains some code. Copy this code and place it between the <head></head> tags on every page on your site.

If you are using Google Tag Manager to install tags, you will just create a tag using the “custom HTML” option and set the tag to fire on all pages.

Targeting Options in Quora

When setting up a campaign on Quora, you are given the choice of selecting several pieces of targeting.

• Topic targeting allows you to place your ads next to content associated with specific topics.
• Question targeting sets your ads only to appear next to a specific question that you choose.
• Audience targeting allows you to target specific audiences that you create from users on your site.
• Broad targeting, as the name suggests, will set your ads to target the broadest possible audience of Quora users.
• Location targeting allows you to pick specific zip codes, cities, states, or countries in which to show your ads. You are also able to add negative locations to exclude your ads in certain locations.
• Desktop & mobile targeting allows you to choose which device types you want your ads to display on as well as the specific mobile platforms you would like to target (iOS or Android)

Campaign Structure

To set up your campaign, you will need to click on the “create campaign” button located in the upper right of the screen. After that you should see a screen that looks like this:

Here you will name your campaign, select your objective, select the type of conversion that you would like to track and set a budget for the campaign.

• Ad Sets – Similar to Facebook, Quora campaigns contain ad sets in which you will determine the budget and targeting options. After you determine the campaign structure you will be directed to a page that looks like this:

• Ads – After completing your ad set, it’s time to create your first ad. When creating an ad, you will need to choose whether it is an image or text ad. After that, you will enter your business name (up to a max of 40 characters), a 65 character headline, body text up to 105 characters, and a destination URL. You are also able to choose from a large list of calls to action to incorporate in your ad.

Best Practices for Quora Advertising

1. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that Quora has very strict rules regarding their ads. Any ad that contains improper capitalization, spelling, or punctuation will be disapproved. The headline of each ad should be a full sentence and end with either a period or question mark.
2. If you already have a Google Ads account, you can create highly targeted Quora campaigns by importing your keywords over from Google. When you copy and paste your top performing keywords into Quora, you will see suggestions for which topics you should target. This is a good tool to utilize if you are unfamiliar with Quora’s topic categories.
3. Make sure to add irrelevant questions as negatives to limit who will interact with your ads. You can find this option, along with the option to negate locations, at the ad set level. The best way to find irrelevant questions is to start by typing a broad topic and then look at the suggested questions provided by Quora. Setting up these negatives helps to ensure that your ads are only showing to the most relevant users.
4. Quora advertising is still relatively new, having launched mid-2017, so the jury is still out about how effective it can be for some industries and verticals. From our experience, Quora has been effective for driving marketing qualified leads (MQLs) in for B2B, especially in more technical fields like SaaS and high-tech.

Final Thoughts

While Quora is not the biggest advertising platform out there, it can still be a very powerful tool to utilize with proper campaign targeting. Quora has a lot of potential as a complementary ad network.

If you have a well-established Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Bing account, it is worth giving Quora a try to see if you can attract customers in a brand new way. Quora will probably never be as well-known as Facebook or Google, but Quora’s ad platform continues to improve—we recommend you experiment!

If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with digital advertising, learn more about how to receive a free Google AdWords audit.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.