I've been a fan of Quora for a long time, and end up spending many hours disappearing on wild tangents, following stories or themes I've subscribed to. Normally completely non-work, but always fascinating and always learning new things.
I had heard Quora was a favourite target for SEO's, ie target a conversation relevant you to your business, answer a question or provide a solution, whilst linking to your business. Those that can't pull it off just look like the usual low-grade spam. But some get some very good results when done properly.
Then I heard Quora had moved into PPC. After initially dismissing it, I decided to explore it as a possible replacement after falling out with Google (that's another story). So I had a dabble, without spending any time on it, created only 1 advert and started a campaign with a healthy dose of cynicism.
To my surprise, it was actually generating conversions, albeit only a few, but was only costing me about £1.50 a day! I got sidetracked and it was a couple of weeks later when I managed to allocate some time to sit down and look at it properly.
I created multiple adverts, targeted specific topics, and added country exclusions. Guess when I started taking it a bit more seriously...
So what started as a half-hearted experiment is turning into a viable lead generating machine.
If like me you are a bit cynical about advertising on Quora, I'd suggest you rethink and give it a try. Allocate a small budget, just £5 - £10 per day. Set up a block of adverts (I did 4), let them run for a week and check the analytics and see how they are performing.
As with any PPC program, it is about test and tweaking until you are getting a viable return you are happy with. But make sure any changes you make have time to bed in and show results (good or bad) before making more changes. The advantage of Quora is you can target specific topics and conversations with your advert. Not only that, you can see what sort of topics and conversations are making the noise and plan your adverts accordingly. Whereas Google tends to be more general. I can see this working for most type of businesses, whether service or product-related.
To monitor goals, like other PPC programs you will need to add a bit of code to your website to track events, and then add a goal conversion event to the pages that you want to track as a success. But this is straight forward, and if you don't have access to your websites code, talk to your web developer for who it should be a 5-minute job.
If nothing else, it's worth a look as a potential lead generation tool in this ever more uncertain world. I'm still a big fan of Google, regardless of our recent spat, but I think Quora is a lot more effective than say Facebook PPC, at least in my industry.
If you do try it or use it, report back and let us know how you got on. If anyone wants an update as to how my campaign is going, ask me in a month or twos time and I'll put some more screenshots up.
