Effective contextual advertising from Yandex.Direct. How not to drain the budget?

What is contextual advertising in Yandex Direct?

Often, novice entrepreneurs think that as soon as they go online, a golden hail of orders will be shed. They do not take into account that the site itself will not sell. To order a page and earn a billion in six months is the case about which the famous Alice said: “The plan is excellent: simple and clear. There is only one drawback – it is completely unknown how to fulfill it. Even if you offer the best products and services, at least you need to set up contextual advertising correctly.

What is advertising campaign management in Yandex, how to create and analyze it – read on.

How does advertising in Yandex work?

What tasks is contextual advertising suitable for? For almost all commercial projects. If potential buyers are looking for something on the Internet, it can be sold through context. Naturally, this does not apply to “products for adults.” But even here, entrepreneurs are finding ways to get around the heavy censorship of search engines.

The advertiser creates an ad and invites the search engine to place it. How often, where and at what price ads will be placed, determines the electronic auction. Contextual advertising in Yandex works through the Direct service.

The most popular payment option is per click (CPC). The advertiser creates an ad and pays for visits to the target site. The system determines the cost per click based on several parameters, while the advertiser can set the maximum allowable cost per click.

Parameters that affect CPC:

1. Topic competitiveness;
2. Click through rate or CTR;
3. The amount of coverage received;
4. Relevance of ads to search queries.

It depends on how the campaign is created correctly, whether you will have effective advertising in Yandex Direct and income.

To track the success of events, we use the Yandex Metrica tool for analytics (in this case, Yandex Direct and Metrica must be interconnected):

• number of impressions;
• number of transitions;
• average cost per click;
• duration of the visit;
• CTR.

And also to generate customized reports.

How to set up advertising in Yandex Direct?

To create an advertising campaign, you need:

• determine the CA
• collect a list of requests through the analysis of competitors’ ads, supplement it;
• write your ads correctly.

The first thing to do is to determine the target audience of the site. Advertising for programmers will be different from advertising for welders or managers.

In order to conduct business effectively, it is necessary to have complete information about the buyer, to know the interests, pains, needs and tastes. Create a spreadsheet and fill in the points:

1. Geofactors (region, city, number of inhabitants, climate conditions).
2. Demographic factor. These are age, gender, children and nationality.
3. Social position (status). Income, education, solvency.
4. Aspirations and values of the client. This is what is important for a person: ecology, passion or image are the most important sales factors.
5. Negative points – what avoids the target audience, values \u200b\u200bwith a “-” sign, for example, the products of corporations or aggressors.
6. Pain and fear are powerful advertising tools.
7. Hobbies and interests. Knowing the hobbies of customers, we can offer them what they need.

A correctly drawn up portrait of the target audience will come in handy in business many times, it will allow you to get much more income from any advertising.

The Yandex Audience tool makes it possible to select who will be shown ads, as well as segment the target audience, send special offers and display targeted ads.

Audiences allow you to work with old clients based on separately loaded databases. “Catch up” with advertising subscribers and users of mobile applications. Find potential customers according to geolocation. Find people with similar interests, etc.

The portrait of the target audience is your average buyer. An attentive reader will notice that everyone has a surname, name and patronymic, but in marketing generalizations cannot be avoided.

How to collect a list of requests?

Keyword selection is something that SEO specialists, copywriters and content marketers regularly face. It is also relevant for project owners, because the manager must be aware of how the business works. Keywords are necessary when planning advertising and working with target audience. With proper use, they turn into ideas for business, and therefore into profit.

The list of search phrases for advertising differs from what is used in the semantic core of the site. Advertising is primarily commercial inquiries. To create campaigns, you can manually sort through keywords using Wordstat.

Yandex Wordstat is a Yandex impression statistics service for a specific query. It makes it possible to assess the interest of visitors to certain topics. When using it, you need to remember that the output by default displays statistics for the month.

The main functionality of Wordstat allows you to:

1. Pick keywords.
2. Analyze geographic and seasonal dependencies.

Let’s see how it works. To do this, go to https://wordstat.yandex.ru/. Here we see the window:

The interface is intuitive, we enter the key we are interested in in the search bar and we can sort the information by:

• words;
• regions;
• request history.

Please note that from the very beginning we do not change anything, that is, we look at the statistics for all regions (the dot remains opposite the “by words” position).

The left column shows the number of impressions in the last month. Here on the left are queries containing the given keyword. In the right column are similar queries.

During the selection, Yandex gives out words in accordance with its internal algorithm, which means that they are broadly consistent with the given one. Those. To display an ad for a given keyword, the user’s query must contain the same words as the keyword. At the same time, the words in the query can be in any order, in any form, and also contain other words. This allows us to get the maximum reach for ads, but if we want to narrow down the search, we can always use special keyword match operators:

• quotation marks (“”) – if you enclose the key phrase in quotation marks, then ads will be displayed only for the specified phrase without additional words, while the word order and word form may change;
• exclamation point (!) – fixes the word form of the word, i.e. its gender, number, case, and other declensions;
• the “or” operator – |, known to programmers, helps to compare multiple queries. Used with parentheses to compare query frequency in different “(iPhone 10 | iphone 10)” phrases.
• square brackets []. Precisely fix the order of words, and also show derivatives that can be obtained from the available keys.
• minus “-” removes unnecessary words;
• plus “+” is used to force the inclusion of prepositions in the query. By default, prepositions are ignored by the Yandex Direct system;
• parentheses () are required to combine multiple conditions.

When drawing up a marketing strategy and planning advertising, it is important to know where the request comes from. Yandex allows you to sort by sources:

• stationary computers/desktops;
• mobile devices in general;
• telephones;
• tablets.

Using this information makes it possible to target targeting more precisely and thus save the advertising budget.

Sorting by regions shows statistics of requests for given locations. This is a useful feature when setting up ads and working with geotargeting.

Analysis of competitor ads

Analysis of advertising campaigns is an effective way to become a leader in a niche. It is easier and more efficient to create a campaign based on the best practices of direct competitors, with the help of improvements and additions.

What to analyze:

• keywords;
• headings and text;
• landing pages for ads;
• budget and efficiency;
• targeting.

To study, you will need the Yandex service and a few more specialized tools.

For example, Serpstat allows you to download and save an advertising campaign with position, CPC, and traffic volume as a separate file. The Competitors tab shows who else is using the same keywords in ads. “Missing keywords” are queries that other companies have, but are not used by you.

It’s comfortable. You can take ready-made solutions and make your own projects based on them. But in any case, you will have to finalize and rewrite the ads.

How to write ads correctly?

Yandex Direct supports three types of ads. You will get to know most of them in the course of competitor analysis, but it is necessary to summarize the information.

1. Text. Includes 2 headings, 30 characters in size. The text itself is up to 80 characters. Example:

In order to increase competitiveness, we recommend creative advertising texts and attractive headlines.

2. Text-graphic. They differ in aspect ratio (1:1; 4:3; 3:4; 16:9). File size – up to 10 kb, picture in jpg, gif or png. Size in pixels from 450 to 5k. Example:
   

As a general rule, text and image ads perform better if they have something to offer in a compelling visual format, like the wedding theme example.

3. Yandex Direct advertising has a built-in image ad constructor. File size – up to 120 kb, picture in jpg, gif or png, sizes from 240×400 to 970×250 pixels. In fact, these are banners with advertising and a link to the page.
   
4. Ads with video content. You can attach small videos to text ads. This is a relatively new service. Yandex Direct has functionality for creating and editing video ads, as well as a template constructor.

Campaign Performance Control

In order to make an effective campaign, use the Budget Forecast tool (from Yandex).

The form looks like this:

Below is the “Calculate” button. In fact, everything is clear here, but there are a few subtleties:

• the more precisely you indicate the region, the higher the efficiency, do not indicate the regions and cities in which you do not work;
• if there are representative offices in different regions, it is better to create separate campaigns for each;
• set the real period of the campaign (a week will show little, and a year will reduce the accuracy of the data);
• remember that this is a dynamic tool, work with key phrases, minus ineffective ones and you will be able to achieve a better distribution of funds.

Rate Adjustment

Adjustments are designed to improve the effectiveness of advertising. You can set them both for entire campaigns and for individual ad groups. This works by impressions for representatives of certain regions, age groups, by gender and by the type of devices from which the user enters.

To work with adjustments, you need to go to the page for editing ad groups or campaign parameters and click the “Edit” button. The system will prompt you to make changes to:

The point is that you can raise or lower the bid under the required conditions, increase the number of impressions for certain audience categories.

It must be said that adjustments are a useful tool, but, with an inattentive approach, it will not be difficult to drain a monthly budget in a week.

Possible problems and solutions

And so you studied the target audience, looked at competitors, made ads, launched ads, but something went wrong. We at the MAVR agency most often encounter 3 cases:

• no traffic;
• there is traffic, but they do not buy;
• there are conversions, traffic, but advertising is too expensive.

These are typical phenomena for most projects. Let’s briefly consider what to do in such situations.

Option 1 – turn to professionals who will help set up the campaign. It’s fast, efficient, but not free.

Option 2 – do it yourself. You spend time, invest effort, but you gain knowledge and learn to do everything yourself.

In the absence (or a small amount) of traffic, pay attention to the amount of the bid, targeting (TA, region, gender, age …), the number and quality of ads. Understating the rate reduces the number of impressions, incorrect targeting leads to the fact that the advertisement is seen by the “microscopic” target audience. And ads that are misplaced, irrelevant, or leading to the wrong pages can spoil the result of the entire company.

There is traffic, but they do not buy. Such a problem often arises due to the fact that “mountains of gold” were promised in the announcement, but the information is not confirmed by anything – special offers are sold, shares were last year. Such advertising is not useful and hurts the reputation.

Irrelevant landing pages are a similar problem. For example, a user is looking for a kettle, but falls into the category of pots. There may also be relevant landing pages, but the site converts poorly – poor design, little information about products, inconvenient navigation. Naturally, the client is offended and leaves … How to fight? Study user behavior through Webvisor, analyze ads and make adjustments.

Advertising is expensive – reconsider the rates. There is a limit after which you should not increase the cost of a click, it is not effective. Also narrow your targeting, specify the target audience and region.

Another point is adding stop words, adjusting queries. Often these measures help in all three situations, but they need to be implemented systematically and purposefully, after analyzing your campaign and the campaigns of competitors. The result of such adjustments will be visible in 3-4 weeks.

Refinements and stop words

The system calculates the cost of a click based on statistics for 28 days of ads. There are a number of factors by which the system ranks ads. The important thing is popularity.

You need to track the “working” advertising, on the requests of which people come. At the same time, block impressions and refine keywords if ads are not effective. For example, the key “cargo transportation” can be broken down into “furniture transportation”, “container transportation”, “large cargo transportation”, etc. If a broad query is not effective, feel free to narrow it down.

The principle also works in reverse. Do not order “furniture transportation today”, “gazelle for transportation”, try “we will move quickly” or just “moving”.

Naturally, the number of adjustments and clarifications will lead to an increase in the cost of ads. The cost of each will vary, the task is to find effective ones and weed out the extra ones.

Note: non-working ads indirectly increase the cost of the campaign!

Conclusion

Alice (L. Carolla) said: “If every person did his own thing, the Earth would spin faster.”

It’s hard to disagree with this, but situations are different. Sometimes it is better to outsource advertising from the first day. Especially if hundreds and thousands of ads require scrupulous study. If it is interesting to figure it out on your own, this article will help minimize costs and increase the effectiveness of contextual advertising.