A few months ago, I wrote a basic guide on How To Setup A Campaign In Quora Ads. At the time the guide was written, our team was in the early phase of testing the various campaign and targeting options available within the platform. After a few months of testing and collecting data, I want to circle back and detail what targeting is working and what isn’t for our team in Quora.
Since launching in December, Quora has performed extremely well in terms of delivering cheap, qualified leads to our client in the software industry. The cost per lead in Quora is less than half of what we are experiencing in AdWords over the same period. The biggest challenge our team has faced in Quora is scalability. The Quora interface is still lacking key metrics, like impression share, that are helpful in setting budgets and adjusting bids.
Because of the current platform limitations, our account’s main objective has been to grow volume as much as possible to take advantage of Quora’s relatively cheap leads. With relatively few levers to pull, we decided to test the various targeting types and craft our expansion strategy from the results. Please note that all the campaigns we ran were conversion campaigns.
What Works
Topic Targeting
Topic targeting has been by far the most successful targeting type for our test in terms of delivering the highest conversion volume. With the Topic targeting type, text ads will appear next to content associated with designated topics in Quora. The general idea is that your ads will show broadly in discussion threads that fall within the selected topics.
Quora will make topic recommendations based on a list of keywords that you enter into the interface. More than one topic can be targeted per ad group, allowing you to group closely related topics.
Topic targeting worked great for us because of its ability to deliver a large amount of traffic and conversions.
Audience Targeting
The audience remarketing campaigns that we setup in Quora performed well in terms of having a high conversion rate, although overall conversion volume was relatively low. Quora makes setting up audiences easy, with everything necessary right in the interface.
Our team tested several audiences over the last months including website visitors, non-converters, and past converters. The non-converters audience performed best for us. We experienced an extremely high conversion rate, although overall volume was limited.
What Didn’t Work
Question Targeting
Question targeting was the least productive targeting option in terms of delivering traffic, Question targeting allows you to decide specifically what questions or discussion threads you want your ad to show up on. This extremely granular option would be great if you need to control exactly where and how your ad will show, but we found that this option simply doesn’t deliver enough impressions to be successful.
Other Notes
Interest Targeting
Interest targeting is a targeting option that our team has not yet tested. With interest targeting, Quora gives you a recommended list of targets based on keywords that are entered. Ads will show to users who have the same interests as selected in your targeting.
Our team found it challenging to identify personal interests that would closely aligned with our B2B product. If you are advertising a more consumer-focused product, this targeting setting will likely have a broad reach, like topic targeting.
Bidding
As mentioned previously, Quora bidding remains a challenge due to the lack of data the platform shares. Our team has been making bid adjustments to keep our bids within the recommended range that Quora gives in the interface. While this strategy has worked so far, it would be extremely helpful if Quora provided additional data that would be helpful in bidding and setting budgets.
Bidding is an area where the platform will need to develop further. It is difficult to develop an overall budgeting and bidding strategy with no back-end data.
Conclusion
Quora is certainly worth testing if you have a B2B product based on the inexpensive cost of leads and relevance of Quora’s topics and interests. With B2B CPCs rising in AdWords and LinkedIN, Quora could be your account’s next big win.
