I always get pumped up when a new advertising platform comes around, so when Quora announced last month that it was opening up its ad platform to the public, I jumped at the chance to try it out. We recently launched a slew of Quora campaigns for one of our clients and I learned some things along the way that I wanted to pass on…and that I wish someone had told me before I set up our client’s campaigns. But more on that later.
What is Quora?
Quora is a question-and-answer site where content is generated specifically by its user community. I like these brief descriptions by Quora founder Adam D’Angelo:
- Quora is an online collaborative information sharing and learning platform.
- Quora is an online engineering platform that connects the information needs of real people with information solutions provided by real people.
- Quora is an expanding, continuously improving, democratically ranked resource library that contains ‘bite’ sized nodules of highly contextualized learning.
What Targeting Options are Available to Advertisers?
If you’re looking for a step-by-step set up guide, check out JD Prater’s post. I just want to give you a rundown of the available targeting options to help you evaluate if this could be a good platform for your client(s). Although Quora’s targeting options pale in comparison to platforms like Facebook, its options are decent to start and I look forward to seeing them grow with time. The Topic targeting ability might be the saving grace, as it allows you to choose content topics relevant to your product/service. You can either use the handy search bar to see ideas:
Or you can choose the ‘Find More Topics’ button and enter some of your top performing keywords to see topic ideas:
In addition to Topic targeting, you can choose your geo location and device (Desktop or Mobile).
5 Things You Should Know
Now that I’ve given you a brief description of the platform and your targeting options, here are 5 things you need to know as you’re setting up your campaigns:
1. Campaigns are automatically enabled
This one is pretty straight forward but important to note. After you create an ad, the platform automatically enables that ad’s campaign. The following notification will pop up:
The upside is that the ad(s) will go into review first, but the campaign itself is enabled when you create an ad. Not ideal.
2. No Title Case Allowed
Quora has some pretty extensive ad policies, which is great to help ensure ad quality. However, one that surprised me is that title case is not allowed. I had broken out 70-some ad sets, in an effort to view performance separately for each of the topics, only to find out that none of the ads were approved due to title case.
3. There’s an Ad Import Feature
Creating new campaigns, ad sets and ads isn’t overly quick or efficient, but one feature that sped up the process for me is the Ad Import feature. You can give your ad a name, that’s just used for internal purposes and then choose to import that ad into additional campaigns and ad sets:
4. There’s a Conversion Pixel Review Feature
Under the ‘Conversion Pixel’ tab in the top navigation bar there’s a section called ‘Recent Views on the Pixel’ which shows you the Referrer URLs where the conversion pixel fired in the last 15 minutes. This is super handy to help ensure that conversion tracking is working properly in the account.
5. There’s an MCC Function
If you navigate to the ‘Account Settings’ tab in the top navigation bar and scroll down to ‘User Accounts’ you can choose to add a new user.
You can set up a profile for yourself then send the URL to the client to add you; just be sure they add you via your profile URL instead of your email address. Once you’re added as a user this way, you’ll be able to utilize one log in and see all of the accounts you manage in the drop down list in the upper right-hand corner.
These are definitely tips I wish I had known before diving in to set up our client’s campaigns. I hope you found them helpful!
Have you tested out Quora campaigns yet? We’d love to read your tips in the comments section below!
