• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 1, 2019

First Reddit. Now Quora. Marketers are gaining more options to speak with consumers through search-related, performance-related advertising.

Quora -- known as a platform for users to share ideas and ask questions to get answers -- has launched Action Insights, a tool to help marketers understand the competitiveness of a brand’s ads in the Quora platform.

The three new metrics, introduced Thursday include Auctions Lost to Competition, which shows the percentage of auctions that the marketer's ad set entered but did not win an ad impression in one of the ad slots available. Second, Impression Share is the percentage of auctions the ad set entered and won an ad impression. And third, Absolute Impression Share is the percentage of auctions that the ad set entered and won.

Quora also provides a detailed description of how to use Action Insights. For example, the campaign has a high “auction lost to competition” rate, and marketers may want to increase their bids or improve the creative ad.

Quora’s auction considers the amount the advertiser is willing to bid and the relevance of the ad content served to the site visitor.

Earlier this week, Quora also announced targeting that allows advertisers to bid on keywords contained in the questions. Keyword Targeting allows advertisers to build their ad copy to closely map the keywords they want to target.

It’s a bit different than search because advertisers use keyword targeting for the platform to serve ads against relevant questions on Quora.

For example, advertisers in the Financial Services industry can target ads using keywords such as “financial planning” to show ads against relevant questions on Quora.

The match types broad and phrase, along with the ability to add negative keywords, provide more options.

Similar to Google Ads and Bing Ads, broad-match targets close variations of the keyword. The match option, of course, enables marketers to target the search query when the platform recognizes the exact keyword phrase. The “exclude” keywords allows marketers to do just that -- to exclude words and phrases when targeting.