Quora's self-serve ad platform is now open for public

Quora, one of the world’s leading Q&A sites have finally launched its self serve ad platform to the public. The website, where you can find the answers for questions of any field imaginable has finally brought its ad platform out of the beta stage. Founded 7 years ago, it has been slow in boosting its ad based revenue.

While the service has been active since April last year, it has been available only for a closed group of pre-approved partners like Shopify, Hubspot and Udacity among others. This comes barely a month after it joined the ‘Unicorn club’ raising $85 million in a series B funding led by seed accelerator Y Combinator and Collaborative Fund evaluating it at $1.8 billion.

Quora currently offers two native ad formats — text and app install ad — that run on question pages and include a call-to-action button. Ads are sold on a CPC basis in a real-time auction, and campaigns can be targeted by topics, location and device.

It works in the same manner as Google’s AdWords. Once advertisers target an ad, they can choose a budget which is used in a CPC (cost per click) real-time auction model. Advertisers set their CPC bid and then adjust it based on performance. Quora will also offer a conversion pixel and work with mobile attribution partners to show advertisers evidence of performance and ROI.

Although it is a good option as Quora has almost 10 million app installs and a relative website ranking of 57 in the US according to a report by Alexa.com, they provide a minimal number of topics (only 3) for topic targeting. They also avail targeting by geography and platform. This pales in comparison to ad giants like Facebook who have seemingly unlimited targeting options.

Now Quora can finally spare some man power from targeting ads and also boost its revenue. It seems like Quora is finally getting a hang of this booming ad business.