Regardless of your industry or business niche, you can find your audience on Quora in no time.
Here's how to find the right users to target with ads on Quora.
1. Confirm that your audience is on Quora
The good news is that you can see if your audience is already on Quora without having to run ads. That's because you can sign up for a Quora for Business account, start collecting audiences, and see if Quora ads are right for you without having to share your credit card information.
Use the Quora Pixel to create an audience of Quora users on your website.
See you on Quora for Business and create an account. Once you've signed up, don't start creating a campaign right away. Instead, click on the Pixels and Conversions tab in the top navigation. Then, click on the “Setup Pixel” button on the right side of the page.
In the window that opens, you have the option of installing the pixel manually or with a partner. THEinstalling the Quora pixel using Google Tag Manager is the easiest way, so select Install with a partner.
Now navigate to Google Tag Manager to begin installing the pixel. In the left navigation, select Tags, then click New on the right.
When creating your new tag, choose the Quora Pixel tag type and paste in the pixel ID that you just copied from the Quora interface. For the trigger, choose All Pages. Then add a name for the tag and click Save.
After publishing the tag, you can start collecting audiences in Quora.
Upload a list of customers to generate an audience
To find out if your current customers are already using the platform, you can upload a CSV file containing all of your email addresses to Quora. To do this, click the Audiences tab at the top of the page and then click Create Audience.
In the Create Audience window, select List Match.
Then fill in the details about your audience and download your customer file.
If you find that the match rate is high, you can start launching targeted list matching campaigns or create sister audiences from your current customer lists to launch sister campaigns at the top of the channel. Note that your base audience needs to have at least 3,000 users before you can create a similar audience in Quora.
2. Find questions and topics to target users with Quora ads
Once you know you have an audience on Quora, the next step is to research questions and topics to target with your ad campaigns.
If I had to explain Quora to someone, I would say it's a question and answer site. All questions asked by Internet users are classified by topic.
So when you're signed in to Quora, you can use the search function in the top navigation to start your searches. In particular, you can search for specific questions.
You can also search for specific topics.
Manually researching questions and topics is a way for advertisers to study audience volume, but it's not the only option. In the next two sections, I'll explain more specifically how to better use the search function to find targeting options for future advertising campaigns.
3. Start a Quora ad to answer a specific question asked by Quora users.
Question targeting
Question targeting is just one way to target your ads. You can't get more specific than that. If you see that Quora users are asking specific questions and that your business has the perfect solution to those questions, you can show ads about those specific questions. And since Quora allows you to add a 1200 x 628 image to your ad, you could be the only eye-catching visual element on the page.
While the specificity of question-based targeting is surprising, it can sometimes be difficult to adapt. Before launching a campaign with multiple sets of question-targeting ads, first consider the volume of your desired questions.
Let's say you're running ads for a customer relationship management company that focuses on small businesses or sole traders. You might want to focus on questions like this:
Before deciding to focus on this question, take a look at a few things on the question page. First, see how many people are following the question.
Relevant questions that have a large number of followers are an indication of the popularity of the question and the number of times users can go to that specific question's page to get the requested solution. The more followers a question has, the more likely it is that you want to target it.
If you see questions with few or no followers, you may be inclined not to target that specific question. But before you abandon it, check another point. Just below the question, click on the ellipsis and select the View Statistics and Log option from the dropdown menu.
You will then see the entire history/log of answers to the question. Focus on the statistics data for the question on the right side of the page. In particular, write down the total number of lifetime views of this question and the date when someone last followed the question.
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For your question targeting campaigns, you want to choose questions that have a large number of followers and you probably also want to choose questions with a large number of views. Sometimes you can find questions with only a few lifelong views.
Evaluate the statistics for each question
It only takes a few seconds to assess the statistics for each potential question to be targeted. Go the extra mile to make sure you're targeting questions that users are going to see. If you find questions that you like but aren't ready to target right now, go back to the ellipsis menu and choose to follow the question privately.
Each Quora user has an area in their profile where they can view all of the questions they've followed.
You can use this feature in a number of ways:
- Save questions that are relevant but few in number. This allows you to check later if the volume has increased.
- Proactively research questions about an upcoming product release and record them so you can consult them. When the time comes to launch your advertising campaigns, you'll already have a list of questions to target.
- Follow up on questions about your competitors privately. See what users are asking and responding to about your competitors. You can then use this information to design ad copy for Quora that perfectly matches your competitors' questions.
4. Find topics to target users with Quora ads
If you find that question-based targeting doesn't have the reach you're looking for, or if you have a larger budget, switch to topic-based targeting. You can easily search for topics related to almost any industry.
I mentioned earlier that all questions on Quora are grouped into themes. Topics allow advertisers to target all questions instead of looking for questions one at a time.
While you can use the search function to find topics to target, the easiest way to search for lots of topics at once is to start creating a Quora ad campaign. Don't worry, you don't have to spend any money to do this research yet. You're just going to start the process of setting up a campaign and researching your targeting options. At this point, you won't spend a cent on the platform, just like when you create audiences.
To start your search, click New Campaign. On the next page, you'll need to add a campaign name and budget before you can continue. You can use the default settings for everything else.
After setting up your campaign settings, choose which topics to target at the ad set level. Under the Contextual Targeting heading, select Topics as the targeting type. Then, in the Targeted Topics box on the right, start typing in keywords to search for related topics. Quora will then suggest topics related to your search term. You can choose any of the topics suggested by Quora, as shown in the image below.
To make the process easier, click the Bulk Add link. In the window that opens, use keywords again to search for topics, then check the boxes for each applicable topic option recommended by Quora.
After you've researched all of the topics you want to target, review the targeting criteria for what you currently have in place. More specifically, look at the potential impressions that your current targeting options may receive.
Just as you've used audiences to find out how many of your current customers or site visitors are using Quora, you can use targeting criteria to find out how many times users in a desired target audience can see your ads. It's further proof that your target audience is using Quora.
In addition to looking for keywords related to your products or services, consider looking for these targeting themes to use in your Quora ad campaigns:
- Competing topics : This approach can be much more affordable than trying to target competitor keywords on Google. You may also find that the competitors you want to target don't appear as interests to be targeted on Facebook. Do a search to see if these competitors are showing up on Quora. You can then get estimates of what the recommended CPC auction would be on Quora to compare with other social channels.
- User behavior : It's common to look for topics that relate to your product or service; however, consider looking for topics about How the users can use your product or service. If you sell fertilizer, for example, try to define advertising targeting that goes beyond the scope of fertilizer topics. Instead, consider topics related to user behavior, such as gardening, lawn care, etc. Look for topics where users will have a need for what you're trying to sell.
If you find that the question and topic targeting options aren't giving you the volume you want, consider testing interest targeting. Topic targeting will show users your ad when they're on a question page in your topic categories. With interest-based targeting, you can always search for and target the same subject categories.
The main difference is that interest-based targeting uses historical behavioral targeting. Users have visited or answered questions in your targeted topics in the past, but they could see your ads on any page unless you used exclusions.
5. Set up your Quora Ads ad campaign
Once you've completed your question research and topic targeting, you're ready to set up your Quora ad campaign.
Structure of a Quora ad
Quora ads look like plenty to Google Ads text ads.
The biggest difference, aside from the number of characters and capitals (Quora ads should be written as sentences and not capitalized as you tend to do for search ads), is that Quora ads have a pretty cool dynamic CTA button.
It takes your display URL and combines it with one of dozens of phrases: “Buy Now,” “Free Trial,” etc. to create a compelling call to action that stands out.
The components of a Quora ad are as follows:
- Company name - 30 characters
- Title phrase - 65 characters
- Body of the text - 105 characters
- Display URL - 30 characters
In context, these components look something like this (although the text is less convincing):
As with any commercial, you should try to write an attention-grabbing headline, and support any claims you make by addressing the benefits of your product or service in the body of the text.
From there, all you need to do is select the most relevant CTA button, make sure your landing page is up and running (and the pixel is in place), and you're ready to go.
Setup steps
In your Quora Ads dashboard, click Create Campaign. Then enter the name of your campaign and select its objective. Currently, you can choose from four goals: Conversions, App Installations, Traffic, and Outreach.
You'll also need to define your campaign budget and schedule. Click Continue when finished.
Now move on to the ad set level. Start by adding a name to this ad set and selecting your primary targeting.
Below, enter a city, state, country, or postal code if you want to target (or exclude) a specific location. You can also refine your targeting by device type (desktop and mobile), mobile platform (iOS and Android), and desktop browser (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari).
Additionally, you have the option to exclude specific questions and audiences from targeting with this ad set.
To finish setting up your ad set, decide to optimize ad delivery for clicks or impressions, then set a bid. Click Continue to proceed to the ad level.
To set up your ad, enter the ad name and choose your ad format (Image ad, Text ad, or Promote a response).
Then provide your ad details, including the title, body text, call to action (AAC), image, and landing page URL.
After you've finished setting up your Quora campaign, add a payment method if needed and click Complete Order.
6. Quora Ads ad performance analytics
Quora Ads uses a CPC-based model that's powered by a real-time auction (like, you know, most other online advertising platforms). That means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
But aside from conversions, how do you know if your ads are resonating with your audience?
With Quora's built-in reporting features, of course!
While rudimentary — currently, you can only visualize impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, conversion rate, and spend — Quora can give you a pretty good idea of the relative success of your efforts, both at the campaign level and across ads.
Conclusion
In the world of PPC, recommending new channels to test can sometimes be a not-so-fun obstacle course to overcome. Businesses often think they need to make the most of Google and Facebook before expanding to other channels. But expanding and testing other channels is more important than you think.
Use the recommendations in this article to see if your target audience is on Quora. Since you can do all of these searches for free, you have no excuse not to try Quora ads.
What do you think about it? Would you consider advertising on Quora? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
