The popular Q&A website Quora continues to add features and capabilities to its advertising platform. This time, it's the launch of Auction Insights and Keyword Targeting.
On the modern days of the internet, marketers have access to more data than they need, making measurements of performance somehow difficult to some.
Quora's ad platform lives under the radar, but still it has some very valuable users there.
To assist marketers reach those users on Quora, "we are introducing Auction Insights" to "help you understand how competitive your ads are in the Quora Ads auction."
This Auction Insight has three metrics:
- Auctions Lost to Competition: showing the percentage of auctions marketers have set but did not win ad impression in one of the ad slots available.
According to Quora, its auction algorithm takes both creative relevancy and bid into consideration. If the Auctions Lost to Competition metric indicates the loss rate is high, for example, marketers might consider improving the relevancy of their creative, or raising their bid to be more competitive.
- Impression Share: this is the percentage of auctions the ad set entered and won ad impression.
- Absolute Impression Share: this reflects the percentage of auctions the ad set entered and won the very top ad slot available on Quora.
When marketers win the top spot in most of the auctions they ad set enters, they could expand their targeting to get more reach. They can also test lowering their bid to see how it affects the win rate.
While using Impression Share and Absolute Impression share can give marketers a better sense of the frequency with which competitors may be beating them to the top ad slot, Quora has another feature that should help advertisers even more.
And that is called Keyword Targeting.
This enables those marketers to target questions that contain specific keywords. Here, there are two types of keyword matching:
- Broad Match: this is useful when marketers want to show their ad to a wide audience, but don't want to spend too much time choosing the keywords.
For example, marketers that are interested in targeting any questions that are about "financial planning". Using Broad Match can help them reach a larger audience by displaying their ad on question pages with close variations of their keywords.
- Phrase Match: allows a more narrow and specific targeting than Broad Match by displaying ad only where a question contains exact matches to the marketers' keywords.
For example if marketers used “financial planning” with phrase match, their ad would only show up on question pages where the question contains the phrase "financial planning". Since Phrase Match require an exact match to the phrase, the feature can help advertisers reach those who have expressed a specific intent that matches their business offering.
For convenience, Quora also added Keyword Exclusions, in which advertisers can specify negative keywords or phrases.
But here, advertisers must know that adding too many exclusions can reduce reach.
Auction Insights should give marketers more insight into how their ads are competing, allowing them to fine-tune their creative campaigns and/or bids based on those information.
And with the addition of Keyword Targeting, just like in search, keywords can be grouped in any number of ways the marketers desire. This including by customer journey stage from top to bottom of the funnel, to up-selling and retention.
For the sake of easiness, marketers can even copy the keywords they've used on other search ad platforms to Quora Ads Manager to kickstart their Keyword Targeting campaign.
"One of the most valuable aspects of the Quora Ads platform is the ability to reach high-intent users who are in the market for your product or service," said Quora. "This is a search ad targeting method that can help you more precisely reach users who are expressing an intent that matches your business offering."
Previously, Quora announced Enhanced Conversion and Attribution Tracking, as well as Contextual and Behavioral ad targeting.
In total, Quora is having six primary types of ad targeting, including topic, question, audience, interest, broad and keyword targeting.