You may know Quora as a platform for asking questions and connecting with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers. Valued at $1.8 billion, they’re now shifting to make a play as an advertising platform with Quora Ads, and you can use AdStage to analyze and report on Quora Ads data! And users are responding, as the platform currently has 190 million monthly unique visitors which is nearly double since a year ago, reports VentureBeat .

In an effort to monetize the platform, Quora released their self-serve ads platform out of beta and made it available to advertisers globally. According to Marketing Land , the company has “doubled its ads team, which includes several Facebook ad alums, and is planning to invest in building out the ads platform.”

Back in January 2017, AdStage was lucky enough to get access to the beta and take the platform for a spin. Thus far we’ve been extremely impressed with their roll-out, ad platform, and interface.

Plus, we’ve seen good results running ads!

• 93% of traffic coming from new users
• earning low cpcs (below $0.50)
• fantastic CPAs that are cheaper than AdWords and Facebook
• we wonder how or if they will scale , but at this pace we’re happy with Quora Ads.

To help you get started with Quora Ads, we’re going to walk you through step-by-step on how to setup your ads account and how to create your first campaign down to the ad level.

How to Navigate This Quora Ads Guide

Part 1 - How to Set Up Your Quora Ad Account

• Set Up Your Ad Account
• Additional Business Information

Part 2 - Navigating Quora Ads Manager

• Manage Ads Dashboard
• Account Billing & View Invoices
• Account Settings

Part 3 - Creating Quora Ad Campaigns

• Step #1 - Create Campaign
• Step #2 – Enter Campaign Settings
• Step #3 – Create Your Ad Set
• Step #4 – Create Your Ads

Part 4 - How to Configure the Quora Conversion Pixel

• Install Base Code
• Install Event Code to Track Conversions
• Verify Proper Installation

Step 1:
How to Set Up Your Quora Ad Account

People come to Quora to ask questions and read insightful answers. This includes people looking for reliable information about your company, products, competitors and industry. Advertise on Quora to influence people during the consideration phase of their purchase process.

Step #1 - Set Up Your Ad Account

To get started with Quora ads you’ll first need to set up an ad account. Head over to Quora’s Self-Serve Platform and input your business information.

They start by asking your account information and business information. You’ll need to be ready to assign an account name and input your business information like name and address.

Step #2 - Additional Business Information

The next step is to fill-in additional business information like your website and business description. If you don’t have a website or business description then you can opt to leave it blank.

You’ll also want to add your email or the email where you want to Quora notify you with updates, optimizations, and errors in your account.

Webinar Recap: Getting Started with Quora Ads

Step 2:
Navigating Quora Ads Manager

The Quora Ads Manager is very intuitive to find what you’re looking for. Here’s how the Ads Manager looks and the information contained in the dashboard.

Manage Ads Dashboard

The ads dashboard is a snapshot into account level metrics and performance of your campaigns. Performance metrics are on the left hand side with a trend line displaying the metric over the last 7 days. You can adjust your trend line by clicking on the metrics. In this example, we’re highlighting spend over the last week.

You can see over the last week we only spent $125 and drove 260 clicks with a huge spike on Sunday and dip on Fridays. What’s interesting about Quora is when users interact with on the platform. We’ve found there’s a lot of activity on the weekends, especially on Sundays.

You can toggle the view by selecting the timeframe on the upper right of the graph. Be default you can choose from:

• All Time
• Last 30 Days
• Last 14 Days
• Last 7 Days
• Today
• Yesterday
• Last Month
• This Month
• Custom

Below the trends graph you’ll find your campaign level performance. Here’s the example campaign I created to highlight how it’s previewed on the dashboard.

These are also the default columns Status

• Campaign Name
• Delivery
• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR
• Cost per Click
• Conversions
• Conversion % (or conversion rate)
• Spend
• Remaining Budget

They can’t be edited. Meaning, columns can’t be added or deleted.

Account Billing & View Invoices

After you setup your account, you’ll have access to the Quora Ads Manager. At this point, you can create campaigns, but nothing will run until your billing is updated.

To get there, go to the top navigation in the top left and click on Billing. From here you’ll be able to enter a credit card to get started.

In the future, you’ll use this tab to view current and outstanding invoices and add or update your account's payment methods.

Account Settings

This is where all that information you entered when setting up your profile lives. It also contains your ad account number, address, and contact information.

This tab is also where you can go to add new users. You can easily add users by typing in their name and combing through the results. It helps if they already have a Quora account.

Note: user's added to your ad account will have full privileges to create and edit ad campaigns, update billing preferences, and generate reports.

The last tab is the Conversion Pixel. We’ll break down how to configure the Conversion Pixel toward the end of the post as it can be a little tricky.

Step 3:
Creating Quora Ad Campaigns

Everyone wants to create campaigns that reach and help the right audience. On Quora it’s no different. To help make your campaign a success, we’re going to walk you through every setting for creating your first campaign.

Step #1 - Create Campaign

Let’s get started with your first Quora Ads campaign by going to the top left hand corner and clicking on the blue button that says “Create Campaign.”

Step #2 - Enter Campaign Settings

Next you’ll be taken to a page to complete your campaign settings. Similar to Facebook’s campaign setting, this is where you’ll select your campaign objective and, like AdWords, this is where you’ll input your daily budget and schedule.

A) Name Your Campaign

Enter the name of your of campaign and remember to name your campaigns like a pro .

B) Choose Your Objective

There are two objectives to pick from here. Once a campaign objective has been selected, you will not be able to change your objective without starting a new campaign. You can either pick optimize for conversions or for app installs.

Quora has integrated with Kochava, TUNE, AppsFlyer, and Adjust for mobile app installation performance measurement. If you have a different third party solution you would like supported or require assistance in configuring your installation tracking you can email Quora at ad-support@quora.com

Again, it’s impressive to see a platform in it’s infancy launch with conversion and app install objectives from the outset.

C) Set A Campaign Budget

Now you’ll want to enter in your budget for this campaign. You’ll have two options to select from: daily maximum budget and lifetime budget.

1. Daily maximum budget - the maximum amount overall that can spent on this campaign in a single day.
2. Lifetime budget - the total amount that can spent over the lifetime of this campaign.

Note: you can define a max daily budget and a lifetime budget for your campaign.

4) Set Your Schedule

You can you can either start immediately without an end date or you can create a custom start and end date down to the hour.

Note: Quora doesn’t support dayparting at this point so your ad will run all day for the duration you selected.

Step #3 - Create Your Ad Set

It’s now time to create your ad set. Similar to Facebook and Pinterest, this is the level where the ad targeting and bidding are created.

A) Name Your Ad Set

We are big fans of campaign naming conventions here at AdStage. This is the time to make sure your Ad Set is future-proof and organized by utilizing clear naming conventions.

B) Manually Input Topics

Quora Ads allows you target people based on topics. And it makes a lot of sense. People reading and answering questions on Quora for a specific topic are more likely to click through on an ad related to it. Now is the time to do some research on specific topics, because similar to Reddit you don’t want advertise on the wrong topics.

Next, you’ll input the topics that you want to target with your ads. If you’re looking to get started quickly then group several relevant topics into one ad set to understand if this platform will even work for your business.

Here are tips to selecting topics that will result in a more effective campaign:

• Specific topics:
  • Selecting relevant and specific topics will ensure your ad appears on question pages with topics that apply to your products and services. However, keep in mind that if your topics are too specific, you might not able to reach as many people as you'd like. Applying topics that are too broad may result in lower quality leads. Your best strategy is to strike the right balance between specific and broad topics.
• Your company/product or competitor topics:
  • Find out if your company or product has its own topic on Quora and add that as one of your target topics.
  • See if your competitors and their products have their own topics on Quora that you can use as targeting.

Note : If you’re targeting multiple topics, you won’t be see which one is driving the best performance. If that’s a concern and you want more control then you’ll want to break out each ad set by specific topic. Meaning, one topic per ad set.

C) Import Keywords

Do you have niche keywords? Or keywords that are performing well in search campaigns? Enter keywords from a Google AdWords campaign in order to receive suggestions for comparable Quora topics. Keywords must be entered one per line or comma-separated.

Here are tips to selecting topics that will result in a more effective campaign:

• Choose topics that align most with keywords that people typically use when searching for information about your products and services.
• Identify keywords within your ad copy that might be relevant and aligned with topics that already exist on Quora.
• Look for keywords that you've used on other advertising platforms that have been effective and could translate well into preexisting topics on Quora.

D) Import Locations

For locations you can enter zip or postal codes, cities, states, or countries in order to add multiple locations to your ad set.

Quora Ads Import Locations

Pro tip: this is where you could create location specific ad sets in addition to device specific. For example, you could create the ad sets targeting users in the US, UK, and Canada rather than lumping them all together into one ad set.

E) Platforms

Choose the devices you want your ads to appear on. This is where you could create mobile or desktop specific ad sets.

Pro Tip: Create device specific ad sets if your website isn’t well optimized for mobile traffic or if you’re offer is better perceived on a desktop. Or if you just want to see the difference between desktop and mobile performance.

From our experience, mobile traffic is about 75% cheaper and drives the majority of traffic, and desktop traffic is more expensive, and drives the majority of conversions. It’s worth testing!

F) Excluding Locations and Questions -

A really cool feature Quora added was the ability to exclude certain locations and questions. It’s hidden under the platform selection.

This is extremely valuable if you’re business doesn’t operate in certain locations or if they’re questions/pages in which you don’t want your ad to appear on.

Pro Tip: You’ll definitely want to conduct research on topics to understand which topics you don’t want your ad running on. You want to make sure you establish topic-product fit for maximum results.

G) Setting your Bid

A feature found in Facebook manual bidding and on Pinterest is a suggested bid. You’ll definitely want to experiment with different bids to understand how the Quora algorithm works to optimize your ad results. Our best guess is Quora auction is a lot like LinkedIn’s auction .

The Quora Auction

Whenever a user visits a page on Quora that's eligible for ads, all ads are considered from all eligible advertisers based on the topic/keyword targeting of their ad sets. The winners of the auction are the ads that, according to Quora's predictions, have the highest value for the ads slot.

How is "value" determined? Quora determines value by a combination of factors, including the "likelihood of the user clicking on each ad, the bid of each ad, and the effect of showing each ad on the user experience." If more than one ad slot is available, only one ad slot from each ad account can win the auction.

Pro tip: start with an initial high bid to enter the auction strong. We’ve seen that CTR is definitely a factor in CPC so a strong can help get you a higher ad position on a page which usually results in a higher CTR.

H) Ad Set Summary

On the right hand side of the page, you’ll find a nice little summary of the ad set demographic targeting. In our example ad set, we selected to target two topics, zero locations, both desktop and mobile platforms which should potentially reach around ~4,500-5,500 weekly impressions.

The summary is easy to miss, but it’s really valuable to understand the estimated reach from the targeted topics/keywords you selected. Otherwise, you might be left wondering if all this work was with it.

Step #4 - Create Your Ads

If you’ve written text ads in the past then you won’t have any difficulty creating Quora text ads. It’s just like writing text ads on other platforms, but with slightly different character counts and policies.

Now that you set up your Ad Set, it’s time to create a new text ad. Here are the length requirements that must be adhered to by all advertisers:

• Headline Sentence: Maximum of 65 characters
• Body Text: Maximum of 105 characters
• Display URL: Maximum of 30 characters

It’s worth mentioning that Quora Ads have high standards for their ads and expect them to be as high quality as the content they appear alongside. All ads must adhere to Quora Ad's content policies and guidelines and should be clear, well-formatted, and free from grammatical, capitalization, and punctuation errors. Here’s a breakdown of Quora’s rules and policies for ads.

Let’s walk through all the text ad settings and guidelines for each one.

A) Headline Sentence General Rules

The Headline Sentence fields should be in full sentences and should end with a punctuation mark.

• Headline Sentence : Maximum of 65 characters

• Not permitted: We are looking for machine learning experts. Learn more today
• Acceptable: We are looking for machine learning experts. Learn more today.

B) Body Text General Rules

• Body Text: Maximum of 105 characters

Incorrect/unusual use of capitalization and abbreviations

Ad copy frequently contains unnecessary capitalization, which is not permitted. Commonly known abbreviations are permitted, but where possible, the full word should be used.

Correct capitalization must be used at all times.

• Not permitted: 40% off if you register now. Don't miss this GREAT DEAL.
• Not permitted: 40% off if you register now. Don't miss this GrEaT DeAl.
• Acceptable: 40% off if you register now. Don't miss this great deal.

The first letter of every word should not be capitalized unnecessarily. Titles (such as articles, books, and movies) with consistent capitalization on your website or app is allowed.

• Not permitted: Learn More About Our Services By Signing Up Today.
• Acceptable: Learn more about our services by signing up today.
• Acceptable: Buy Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone today.

Capitalization is allowed for common acronyms, abbreviations, or initialisms. Capitalization is also allowed for trademarks, brand names, or product names that are consistently capitalized on your website or app.

• Acceptable: 40% off if you register now. Register ASAP to not miss this great deal.

Strikethroughs, italics, bold, underlines, and emojis are not allowed.

• Not permitted: We are looking for machine learning experts . Learn more today.

Ellipses are not permitted.

• Not permitted: Sign-up for a free trial today…
• Acceptable: Sign-up for a free trial today.

More body text policies to adhere to:

• Do not include links in your ad text copy.

• Do not use profanity.
• Do not include sexual-related content in your copy unless you have obtained explicit permission from Quora beforehand.
• Do not mention Quora in your ad text copy without prior written permission and approval from Quora.

C) Landing Pages and Destination URL Requirements

Your destination URL must function properly in all browsers and on all platforms that you have chosen to run your campaign on.

Here is what you should be aware of when building your landing pages:

• Should be in English only.
• Should clearly and accurately reflect the product or service being promoted in your ad.
• Should not trigger pop-ups or pop-unders when someone arrives upon or exits the page.
• Should not automatically initiate downloads, malware, or spyware upon arrival.
• Should not link to a file that requires an additional program or application in order to view content.
• Should not have confusing design elements nor include fake clickable elements to entice clicks.
• Should not contain images or words that are included for sensational or shock purposes. This includes images and words that are sensational, aggressive, offensive, disrespectful, threatening, or excessively violent. We also do not permit clickbait ads, including anything that is sensationalist, hyperbolic, alarmist, or that plays on people's fears or self-esteem.
• Should not mention Quora unless you have obtained permission first.

D) Destination URLs:

• Should lead to a page owned by your company, to a web storefront selling your product or service, or to an article about your product or service. If we determine that your display URLs aren't accurately reflecting the destination URL you're directing people to, we reserve the right to reject your ads.
• Should not lead people to a site that is an error page or is under construction.
• Should not be directed to a page that does not explicitly belong to your company, but can be directed to your Quora company account.

E) Display URLs:

• Display URL: Maximum of 30 characters
• Should consist of the domain of your final URL. You are also permitted to use subdomains except when your subdomain is a trademarked term that does not belong to you.
• Should consist of lowercase letters. For example, the words “business” and “Quora” should be displayed as business.quora.com ).

F) Importing Existing Ads

You also have the ability to import from an existing Quora ad, which makes the process for duplicating and creating new ads a little quicker and more efficient.

G) Call to Action

Like Facebook ads, you’ll have the ability to add a Call to Action to your ad. Quora provides advertisers 16 different CTAs encompassing most popular offers.

H) Ad Preview

On the right hand side there lives the ad preview so you can see the see what your ad looks like as you’re creating it.

Step 4:
How to Configure the Quora Conversion Pixel

Quora right out of the gate offers a conversion pixel to track events and goals as specified by you. This code allows Quora to optimize conversions on your ad campaigns, which is really impressive for such a young platform. This code sends data back to Quora so you can measure activity, track conversions, and optimize accordingly.

Note: if you're tracking multiple conversion event pages on your site, you can put the pixel on multiple pages, but they can't yet be tracked separately to individual campaigns in your Quora Ads Manager reports.

There are two options available for marketers looking to install the code. The first option is to add a snippet of code to your website. The other is to

Step #1 - Install Base Code

Install this code on specific pages of your website where the conversion event you want to track will happen.

Option A: Send events on page load
If the event you want to track occurs when a person visits a page, the event code should be installed on that page. To send events on page load, make sure to use Option A from Step 1, and add the event code inside the <head></head> tags directly after the base code. You can also place the event code inside the <body></body> tags if needed, but it is not the recommended approach. It is critical that the following code is installed after the base code defined in Step 1, otherwise it will not work correctly.

Option B: Use an image pixel (not recommended)
For this option, you’ll be given an image pixel base code to paste inside the <body> tag.

Step #2 - Install Event Code to Track Conversions

Option A: Send events on page load
If the event you want to track occurs when a person visits a page, the event code should be installed on that page. To send events on page load, make sure to use Option A from Step 1, and add the event code inside the <head></head> tags directly after the base code. You can also place the event code inside the <body></body> tags if needed, but it is not the recommended approach. It is critical that the following code is installed after the base code defined in Step 1, otherwise it will not work correctly.

For example, you’ll want to place this additional event script right above the End of Quora Pixel Code from Step #1 Option A.

Option B: Send events on inline actions
If the event you want to track does not result in a new page load, the event should be installed when the action happens. To send events on inline actions, use Option A from Step 1, and install the event code to be requested when the inline action happens, in between appropriate <script></script> tags. For example, if a person clicks an 'Add to Cart' button that does not take a person to a new page, then you will want to add the event code to HTML element click handlers, such as to the 'Add to Cart' button example below.

Multi-Event Conversion Tracking (UPDATED MARCH 12TH 2018)

Quora announced that “ Advertisers can choose new conversion types when creating a new campaign to match the campaign objective." This is welcomed feature for Facebook advertisers who are familiar with using their pixel to track different conversions and events .

View-through Attribution (UPDATED MARCH 12TH 2018)

In addition to click attribution, the Quora Ads platform now also offers visibility into view-through attribution. This is useful to understand how your ad impressions are influencing potential customers even when they do not click on the ads themselves. View-through attribution is only counted when someone converts within 24 hours of viewing your ad on Quora.

Step #3 - Verify Proper Installation

To verify your Quora Conversion Pixel is installed properly, visit the webpage where you expect a conversion event to be counted. Referrer URLs will be displayed below. They will reflect pixel views from the last 15 minutes, and will be updated on a 5 minute delay.

Quora Ads Recap

Quora Ads might be better suited for B2B marketers trying to showcase their products/software to users looking for solutions. I think anyone has one run pay-per-click campaigns previously will appreciate the Quora Ads Manager. It’s a hybrid of AdWords and Facebook. They took the best elements of each platform and smashed them together into an intuitive platform for marketers to create campaigns.

You’re now ready to launch your first Quora Ads campaign. Let us know what you think about their ads platform and share some of your initial results in the comments. Best of luck!