It hasn’t even been two years yet, and Quora is still building out features and capabilities at a rapid pace. On Thursday, the company announced the the launch of Auction Insights at SMX West in San Jose, CA. Earlier this week, Quora rolled out keyword targeting, allowing advertisers to bid on the keywords they may already be targeting in search campaigns.
In order to help advertisers understand how they’re performing against others in the ad auctions, Quora introduced three different new metrics.
- 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.
By utilizing both Impression Share and Absolute Impressions share at the same time, it can give you a better sense of the frequency with which competitors could be beating you out for that top ad slot, assuming that you have a high Impression Share and relatively low Absolute Impression Share.
If search campaigns are something that you’re already running, it could be a good idea if you considered testing your top performing search keywords on Quora. This isn’t quite the same thing than search in that you use keyword targeting on Quora to show your ads against relevant questions on the platform.
Similar to search, keywords on Quora are targeted at the ad group or ad set level.
There are two types of match types, broad match and phrase match, and the ability to add negative keywords. With broad match, these keywords target “close variations” of the keyword. Phrase match are much more narrow, as your ad will only show when a user’s search query includes the exact keyword phrase. Negative keywords exclude words or phrases that you don’t want your ads to show for.
Quora now offers six primary types of ad targeting, including topic, question, audience, interest, broad and keyword targeting.