Advertisers, in general, are overwhelmingly positive about the new Quora ad program, which came out of beta earlier in 2017. The new self-serve program allows advertisers to target and create text-based ads at their fingertips. However, the scale of the platform limited its use initially for B2B marketers, although the low Cost Per Clicks and new target base made it highly tempting for businesses of all sizes.
In recent months, Quora has made rumblings that it will change the ad program to be more easily scalable. With this elephant out of the room, B2B marketers will have very little to keep them from using this new soon-to-be behemoth. However, there are some other factors that companies should consider before making a final decision, because Quora may not be for everyone. Let’s take a look.
Quality of Traffic
B2C and smaller scale B2B companies report a high level of quality traffic when advertising on Quora. This is even when Quora is compared to industry giants, Facebook and Google. As a matter of fact, the size of those platforms may actually be what contributes to the lower level of qualified traffic. Quora question pages receive only the people who are looking for a very specific answer–Google and Facebook ads both suffer greatly from casual viewer runoff.
Promoted Answers
Quora introduced Promoted Answers in 2018, a native format letting advertisers sponsor quality answers and serve them to targeted audiences. These placements appear in the home feed, topic pages, and relevant question pages, and run through the same auction system. For B2B teams, the format supports thought leadership by aligning responses with narrow, high intent queries that prospects already research. Targeting options mirror core campaigns, including topic, interest, keyword, and question targeting, which helps maintain context while improving perceived relevance.
Traffic Volume
Despite its lower level of traffic when compared to the big dogs, most advertisers report that Quora has enough traffic to meet their needs.Quora reported about 300 million monthly unique visitors in 2018, giving meaningful reach for many B2B programs. That figure is Quora’s public number, not a third-party estimate. Large-scale B2B firms should worry less about this metric, as total traffic volume has never equated to conversions from those few decision makers who actually have the money to make a purchase at scale.
Advertising Cost
As stated before, Quora has a lower Cost Per Click than either Google or Facebook when similar keywords are compared. It remains to be seen if Quora will be able to keep the platform competitive as more companies (with higher marketing budgets) join in on the service. The type of content on Quora (long, detailed questions) does favor long tail keywords. This works in favor of advertising costs, as advertisers are more likely to choose long tail keywords that are relevant to less of its competition. With more segmented advertising, costs can actually stay quite low for everyone while total volume grows on the platform.
Quora’s Limitations
Quora is a relatively new platform for advertising, and bugs are expected. The campaigns that companies run can be focused on topic, device, and location, although the two latter categories are not quite as sophisticated as Quora’s competition. Companies that build an audience through device and location may want to invest more slowly, although all indications point to Quora upgrading its systems in the near future and staying abreast of search engine industry standards.
Day One Performance
The day one performance of companies that are already using Quora is positive, regardless of the metric being used. Any company that already has an organic presence on Quora is doing especially well in terms of lead contribution. The cost per conversion from a lead generated through Quora has a chance of being much lower than a lead generated through Google or Facebook, because of the higher quality of Quora leads.In 2020, Quora launched Lead Gen Forms, enabling in-platform lead capture with CSV export and integrations, improving measurement and often lowering effective cost per lead. Leads can be routed to common CRMs through supported connections. The one complaint that most users had was that Quora was not using enough of its newfound revenue to expand operations more quickly.
