With the evolution of digital advertising now more prominent than print and TV, it can be an intimidating industry to navigate. Especially since there are about 7,040 digital marketing technologies:
Many advertisers have experimented with popular platforms like Facebook and Google Ads at one point or another — even contemplated Bing vs. Facebook Ads, or social media rivals Facebook and Twitter. However, despite not being as widely used as other PPC ad platforms Reddit and Quora shouldn’t be an afterthought.
Neither Reddit Ads nor Quora Ads are covered as much as other social media or search advertising platforms. But between the lack of competition, the unique audiences, and more — both still have great potential for online advertising ROI.
Today, we’re comparing both advertising channels in five key areas:
- Audience
- Ad types
- Targeting options
- Bidding
Analytics
…to help you determine if either one (or both) is viable for your business.
Reddit ads vs. Quora ads
Audience
Both platforms’ audiences are similar in that they are highly-focused on community engagement, sharing and discussing ideas, and allowing users to be themselves.
With more than 130k sub-forums called subreddits, community engagement on Reddit is tremendous. This is where people go to share and discuss ideas — to actively engage with others.
According to Reddit’s Founder, Alexis Ohanian:
Reddit offers the opportunity for us, as humans, to connect on a much deeper, broader level because users have an alter ego and aren't tied to a social network of friends with whom they want to share how perfect their lives are.
Why does this matter to advertisers? This level of engagement means users are ready and willing to accept information rather than sit back and scroll their feed. While they may not have high purchase intent, per se — they at least have high intention to learn and engage.
Quora’s mission, on the other hand, is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. This includes an amplitude of knowledge and expertise from highly educated organizations and business owners. What separates Quora from other Q&A forums, is the focus on long-form, quality answers from professionals or industry experts.
Naturally, this makes the platform great for reaching an audience of industry leaders and decision makers. Since millions of people use Quora to research companies, products, competitors, and industries, you can use Quora ads to reach them at the right point in their decision making process.
Ad types
Both Reddit and Quora offer text ads and image ads:
However, one major ad type Reddit allows that Quora doesn’t is the ability to create video ads:
This is significant because one study showed that video ads on Reddit have the potential to generate 66% more qualified leads per year, and achieve a 54% increase in brand awareness.
Instead of video ads, though, Quora offers a unique ad type — “Promoted Answers:”
These ads enable you to promote and boost the distribution of your organic content on the platform.
Targeting options
The targeting options on both Reddit and Quora are quite extensive, and each one offers unique options because of their audiences.
Reddit allows targeting by:
- Community — This targets the subscribers and visitors of a specific subreddit (or topic), who can see your ad while visiting the targeted subreddit or when they visit other similar subreddits:
- Interests — You can display your ad to Reddit users who have expressed interest in a specific type of content based on their browsing behavior on Reddit. You have the option to capture a wider audience or narrow it down:
- Locations — Location targeting enables you to reach an audience in a specific location, including country, U.S. state, or U.S. city (city-level targeting is only available for U.S. cities in 210 metro areas):
Note: Reddit’s ad server is set to “no location” targeting by default, so unless you specify a location, your ads will display worldwide to the targeting parameters you have selected for community, interest, time of day, and device settings.
- Time of Day — By default, all ad campaigns start at 12:01 am EST on the start date, and end at 12:01 am EST on the end date. However, with time of day targeting, you can specify which days and times to show your ads based on the viewer’s timezone:
Keep in mind, choosing a specific time or day is likely to reduce the total number of impressions.
- Device — With device targeting, you can target a desktop- or mobile-only audience. If you don’t select a device type, your ad campaign will show across all devices:
Quora
Quora offers a wide array of targeting options, broken up into four different categories:
1. Contextual targeting to show ads relevant to specific topics, keywords, or questions:
- Topic targeting: Allows you to target topics relevant to your business to reach people reading questions within those topics.
- Keyword targeting: By providing a list of keywords relevant to your product or service, you can target questions that match those keywords.
- Question targeting: This makes your ad appear on specific question pages that you select.
2. Audience targeting to create audiences that match web traffic, lookalikes, or contact lists:
- Website traffic audience: Create an audience based on visitors to your website for retargeting purposes.
- Lookalike audience: Create an audience from an existing audience in your Quora Ads Manager.
- List match audience: Create an audience from a list of uploaded email addresses.
3. Behavioral targeting to display ads to users based on their interests or retargeting from their history:
- Interest targeting: Reach users who have demonstrated recent engagement (questions, answers, upvotes, etc.) with certain topics.
- Keyword history targeting: Retarget users by keywords they’ve viewed previously.
- Question history targeting: Retarget users who have previously visited specific pages.
4. Broad targeting shows ads widely across Quora to maximize impressions:
- Broad targeting: Quora automatically targets an audience based on location and device. This targeting is often used to generate website traffic and build brand awareness.
Another benefit of Quora advertising is that you can create audience exclusions to prevent your ads from showing up to irrelevant users.
Bidding
Since neither of these online channels is as competitive as some others, the cost of advertising isn’t as high.
On Reddit, you have three bidding options to choose from:
- Cost per impression (CPM)
- Cost per view (CPV)
- Cost per click (CPC)
CPC was just added in January 2019 as the first performance-driven ad type available on Reddit, allowing advertisers to more reliably achieve their direct response objectives, resulting in better ROI. The CPC bidding strategy is applicable with four campaign objectives:
- Reach
- Video views
- Traffic
- Conversions
Bidding on Quora is similar since the platform allows you to select your bid depending on the maximum amount you want to spend, per:
- Click — ideal for optimizing for website or post-click landing page traffic
- Impression — best for getting in front of as many viewers as possible
- Conversion — useful for maximizing conversion rates
Quora’s bidding system also allows you to control and align your spend by setting up daily and lifetime budgets, and scheduling when your campaigns run. It’s best practice to run a mix of always-on and seasonal campaigns, and leverage the budgeting and scheduling features to manage different campaigns.
According to a Bannersnack experiment on Reddit ads vs. Quora ads, the Reddit ad generated more impressions — 7x more than its Quora counterpart. However, the Quora ads received more clicks. Even with the lower CTR, Reddit was the better platform when measuring conversion rate.
Analytics
With Reddit’s advertising dashboard, you can track analytics by ad, ad group, or campaign. Metrics on Reddit are available in four different categories: General Performance, Ad Group, Conversion, and Video:
Check the boxes you want to see in your dashboard and click “Apply.” Dashboard metrics are then stored for six months. Quora also provides automated data reporting at the ad, ad set, campaign, and account levels for a set time frame.
Unlike Reddit, though, Quora offers Auction Insights as well, so you can see how competitive your ads are in the auction. This feature provides data on:
- Impression share % — The percentage of auctions that the ad set entered and was one of the winners
- Absolute impression share % — The percentage of auctions that the ad set entered and won the top slot
- Auction lost to competition % — The percentage of auctions that the ad set entered and was the best ad set in the account for the auction, but did not win an available slot
Another great feature of Quora is the Quora Pixel, which enables you to track specific events and goals so you can optimize performance and meet those goals. To implement this, look for the code snippet for the pixel under the Conversion Pixel tab, and add the code to the page where you’re tracking conversions. The code sends data back to Quora so you can measure activity, track conversions, and optimize accordingly.
Lastly, Quora offers a growing list of measurement partner integrations to help you automate your workflow while delivering in-depth insights to your campaigns.
Reddit ads vs. Quora ads: Which will you choose?
Deciding between Reddit vs. Quora ads depends on your brand, campaigns, and goals. While there’s a ton of crossover between the two — both are great for targeting niche communities, the competition and cost are lower on both platforms than others, etc. — there are also unique aspects of each.
No matter the platform you choose, be sure to complete each of your ad campaigns with a relevant, post-click landing page. Request an Instapage Enterprise demo today, and start sending all of your prospects to a post-click landing page where they can continue the pre-click story.