If you’re not familiar with the Q & A site, Quora, check it out! It’s a great place to get answers and respond to both personal and business questions. Not only can you establish yourself as a subject matter expert (SME) by responding to questions, you can also purchase advertising to be served up to audiences who might be in need of the products or services you offer — based on the questions they are asking and topics they are reading.

I figured the easiest way to not forget, and, therefore, be able to accurately document the good, the bad, and the ugly of my first attempts at implementing an ad campaign using Quora’s ad manager tool, was to start a draft of a post about my experiences and add to it as I went along with my ad campaign implementation, so here goes.

The Ugly

Before reaching out to Quora Customer Support for help, I attempted to use the Ads Manager tool on my own, but could make no headway (a button never appeared to allow me to save any work, nor did I receive any kind of prompts to move forward). I now believe that had something to do with the fact that I use Chrome as my default browser because  when I switched to Internet Explorer I was able to save my work. At least with my particular computer and Chrome browser set up, I wasn’t able to scroll down in the tool to see what I needed to see and have access to what I needed to have access to.

Despite switching the browser I used to access the Quora Ads Manager tool to Internet Explorer, and being able to, then, edit/add a campaign, when I tried to add/edit an ad set (equivalent to a Google Ads ad group) under a campaign, I wasn’t able to save my work or select my targeting. I got those red circles with the lines thru them — indicating “STOP” — whenever I hovered my mouse over the various targeting options.

Soooooo, I had to reach out to a Quora Ads rep once again, and that’s when I learned that the third item listed under “The Bad” section below was getting in my way of moving forward. However, even after a call with the rep where I seemed to be able to use both Chrome and/or Internet Explorer to make revisions to my campaign, I found that neither of these browsers were allowing me to do all I needed to do in Quora, and I eventually had to use Mozilla Firefox. Yup, crazy but true!

The Bad About Using Quora Advertising

1) when you set up your campaign start date and time, it is only available in Pacific Standard Time, so you need to calculate what your desired start time or end time would be in Pacific Standard Time when you set that up.

2) Unlike with Google Ads where you can spend as little as $1 a day, you are required to spend at least $5.00 a day.

3) Once you set up an ad set and pick a primary targeting option (see options below contextual, audience, behavioral, and broad), you are stuck with that targeting option, unless you want to delete your ad set and start all over again.

4) Each time I finished entering my ad copy, images, and logo for a particular ad, I would see a preview of my ad to the right of the fields where I added them. The preview of the ad included a box with a check in it that said “capital.” I kept trying to launch the ads, but kept getting an error message that I needed to do something related to this checked-off capital box, but whether I left it checked or unchecked, and then hit the “apply” button, I could not seem to get my ads approved for launching. Huge sigh. I kept getting the message that “an ad revision was required.” So, here I go again, reaching out to the Quora ad rep. What it came down to is this — Quora doesn’t like and won’t approve a lot of capitalization in ads.

5) Unlike other “Ad Manager” online tools, such as Facebook’s and Google Ads’, an agency, such as ours, can’t implement an umbrella management account under which it can set up/add, and then run and manage client ad campaigns. An outreach must be made to customer service when a client account needs to be added to an agency’s account.

The Good About Quora Advertising

Unlike Google Ads, Quora encourages the use of punctuation at the end of a statement, so you can use ! and ?, something Google frowns on, and doesn’t normally approve in search text ads.

Customer service is ready and willing to help when you need it!

I did finally get my ads launched and running on Quora. I decided to go with “keywords” as my primary targeting option, and ads, such as the one below, now appear alongside questions and answers related to keywords such as “SEO” and “SEM.”

Stay tuned for future updates via new blog posts that elaborate on how my new Quora ads fared, as well as a more in-depth discussion about targeting options available in Quora.

Reach Out To Our Boston Digital Marketing Agency’s Online Advertising Team

In the meantime, please feel to reach out with any Quora questions — because, hey that’s what Quora is all about — answering questions.