4 reasons why advertising on Quora is a no-brainer

But with rising costs and ad apathy from users, marketers are forced to become more experimental with their ad placements. For many, this has yielded results for the better.

Quora’s time to shine

Question-and-answer platform Quora is one such unsung hero. With its large database of over 400m users, broad topic targeting and engaged audience base, it’s a golden opportunity to test outside of the usual juggernauts.

The platform amasses data on every topic known to humankind. Your audience is likely there looking for information, creating communities, and engaging in debates.

Better yet, they’ve been at it a long time. Quora has been up and running since 2009, and ever since then it’s been in the background, quietly answering all kinds of questions – from full-stack development technicalities to relationship advice. Across that time span, it has learned a fair bit about optimizing the platform for advertisers too.

There’s an opportunity here for those willing to take it. We already know that there’s probably a user base interested in what you’ve got to say. Why not be the brand to tap into it?

Quora advertising in practice

For the naysayers among you, we tested the platform ourselves on a tech company’s brand awareness campaign – and we uncovered some interesting results.

Here’s what we learned after testing for two months and a $10k spend.

1. It’s cheap(er)

When compared with Linkedin, cost-per-click was 99% cheaper on Quora when running static-only ads, costing as little as $0.46. This helped to drive huge amounts of traffic to the site on relevant terms, without blowing the budget.

2. The audience is engaged

The click-through rate on those ads was 0.84%, versus a 0.39% average on LinkedIn for the same creative (and the creative could actually have been better optimized for the platform).

3. It drove leads (but quality could be questionable)

For this client, targeting was very niche and lead quality closely monitored. Unfortunately, although the ads drove interest, the quality of user wasn’t as good as we’d hoped. Lead quality from Quora is dependent on the client’s objectives and constraints — it’s worth keeping in mind that different clients will have varying success.

4. Targeting was pretty good

Targeting is fairly wide-reaching, with opportunity to target contextual topics, lookalikes and user behavior. Although other platforms can pivot specific data groups, Quora holds its own here. It’s worth experimenting with different combinations and segments to see what delivers the best results.

It’s worth testing a small subset of your marketing budget on Quora for your campaign. It expands your digital footprint and may give you another stream in which to inform and delight your audience.

Quora offers a great opportunity to occupy space where the bigger players aren’t as prevalent, with access to a larger segment of your audience. This channel will likely work best for an awareness campaign; but it can work well as a lead generation channel (depending on your client’s needs).

So, by all means, keep on climbing the Empire State Building of digital – but maybe use the lift once in a while.