Member-only story
I Wanted to Spend $50 on Quora Ads but Got Banned Before I Got to $25
I am yet to hear back from the support team
Back a year ago, I released a 150+ page guide on productivity, and I wanted to try to promote it with online advertising. More specifically, I wanted to test out Quora ads. I’ve always been against mindless advertising aimed at the crowd with no real purpose in mind. On Quora, because of very specific questions people ask the community, the ads engine knows better what to show next to what content. I liked that. My ads wouldn’t get in the way of people who were not interested, at least a lot less than with classic advertising.
I work in online marketing, and I’ve witnessed first-hand the inefficiency of some Google and/or Facebook campaigns. It’s not that the targeting is not precise. It’s that it’s so much harder to get it right. For starters, the audience reach is way bigger than on Quora. There are so many knobs to tweak, so many variables to choose from. On top of that, the budget needed to reach the desired audience needs to be very high, because competition is fierce. With Quora, I could start my advertising experience with $50, and see where it would take me. As it turned out, it didn’t take me very far at all.
