Quora adds search-like keyword targeting, Auction Insights for advertisers

SAN JOSE — Quora continues to rapidly build out features and capabilities of its not-yet-two-year old advertising platform. The question and answer platform announced the launch of Auction Insights at SMX West in San Jose, CA Thursday. Earlier this week, Quora rolled out keyword targeting, allowing advertisers to bid on the keywords they may already be targeting in search campaigns.

Auction Insights. To help advertisers better understand how they’re performing against others in the ad auctions, Quora introduced three new metrics on Thursday.

• Auctions Lost to Competition shows the percentage of auctions your ad set entered but did not win an ad impression in one of the ad slots available. Quora says its auction algorithm takes both creative relevancy and bid into consideration. If the Auctions Lost to Competition metric indicates your loss rate is high, for example, you might consider improving the relevancy of your creative or raising your bid to be more competitive.
• Impression Share is the percentage of auctions the ad set entered and won an ad impression.
• Absolute Impression Share reflects the percentage of auctions the ad set entered and won the very top ad slot available. If you’re winning the top spot in most of the auctions your ad set enters, you could expand targeting to get more reach or test lowering your bid somewhat to see how that affects the win rate.

Using Impression Share and Absolute Impression share together can give you a better sense of the frequency with which competitors may be beating you out for the top ad slot, if you have a high Impression Share and relatively low Absolute Impression Share.

Keyword targeting. If you’re already running search campaigns, you might consider testing your top performing search keywords on Quora. It’s a little different than search in that you use keyword targeting on Quora to show your ads against relevant questions on the platform.

Like search, keywords on Quora are targeted at the ad group or ad set level.

There are two match types — broad match and phrase match — and the ability to add negative keywords. Broad match targets “close variations” of the keyword. With the narrower phrase match option, your ad will only show when a user’s search query includes the exact keyword phrase. Exclude words or phrases you don’t want your ads to show for with negative keywords.

Why you should care. Auction Insights give advertisers more visibility into how their ads are competing, allowing them to fine-tune creative and/or bids based on those insights.

The addition of keyword targeting could make search advertisers that haven’t tried Quora yet give it another look. As in search, keywords can be grouped in any number of ways, including by customer journey stage from top to bottom of the funnel to up-selling and retention. And like search campaigns, ad creatives can then be tailored to the keywords.

Quora now offers six primary types of ad targeting, including topic, question, audience, interest, broad and keyword targeting.