Stages of creating contextual advertising. Effective contextual advertising: examples, ways to use it Creating contextual advertising

One of the most effective types of advertising is contextual advertising. Thus, according to Yandex, the volume of this market is increasing annually by 40%, the client response to search ads reaches 5%, while in display and banner advertising this figure on average does not exceed 0.5%. To achieve a good effect, you need to know the rules for using contextual advertising and follow the technology for its use. Let's talk about them.

Kirill Samoshonkov,

General Director, Novatika, Moscow

In this article you will read:

Effective contextual advertising can seriously improve the situation of any company. Online advertising platforms offer several placement options - text ads, media-contextual (text and banner) and simply media banners. Most experts rightly believe that media and media-contextual banners are more suitable for image campaigns (they work on visual memory and are an analogy to traditional advertising: the client saw and, even if he didn’t go to the site, remembered you), and for advertising goods and services it is better use text ads - effective contextual advertising.

Contextual advertising - ads with search results that are displayed in the most prominent places on the Internet page. This is usually the top left corner (the first one to four links) and the right margin. The main sites (more than 90% of the volume of contextual placement), as you might guess, coincide with popular search engines - Yandex, Google, Rambler, and services for advertisers are called Yandex.Direct, Google.Adword and Begun, respectively.

The principle of contextual advertising is inherent in its very name: advertisers' ads are shown when there is a contextual match with keywords in the user's request. Thus, advertisements for the installation of plastic windows will be displayed upon request “installation of double-glazed windows” or “plastic window prices,” and an advertisement “40% discount on LG vacuum cleaners” will appear upon the request “buy a vacuum cleaner” and “promotions on LG household appliances.”

What makes contextual advertising effective?

Due to reaching directly the target audience, only those users who are looking on the Internet for information about a specific product or service, effective contextual advertising has a very high response and is considered one of the best promotion tools. That’s why it’s very popular: there are millions of advertising campaigns a year on major Internet platforms. The advantages of contextual advertising are that it is accessible (promotion on the Internet through context can be started with a minimum budget) and the fact that the client himself can regulate the intensity of promotion in accordance with specific tasks.

The main task of contextual ads is to get a potential client to click on your ad and go to the site. An example of contextual advertising is considered very good when the share of customers who go to the company’s website reaches 5–7% of the total number of people who saw the contextual ad. Although in our practice there are examples when this share reached 30%.

Caution doesn't hurt

Despite its apparent simplicity, this method of promotion requires the advertiser to take himself very seriously, knowledge of the theory and tools of performance management. Moreover, now the sphere of Internet technologies is in a stage of rapid development and it will be difficult for a non-professional to keep track of the latest innovations for competent online promotion. Therefore, as part of large campaigns in highly competitive markets, planners, writers, and analysts are brought in to develop contextual advertising.

If the resources to complete a task are limited and do not allow you to use the services of promotion specialists, you need to prepare as much as possible to independently conquer the peaks of the context. At a minimum, so that due to ignorance of the specifics of the tool, the company’s annual advertising budget is not wasted in just a week.

For those who have decided to launch a contextual advertising campaign on their own, without the help of intermediaries and advertising agencies (and there are already more than 2000 of them on the RuNet), there are now a huge number of tips in the form of detailed and clear instructions on the websites of context providers, and you can also find advice on the Internet from professionals in this market.

Designed for everyone

Almost any business, even the most niche one, will find its consumers through context. Whether you work in the b2c or b2b market, there is no difference. If buyers of your goods and services are online, then one of the shortest ways to reach them is contextual advertising. The modern tools here are so flexible that you can find your client, even if there are very few of them on the Internet.

For example, one of our clients is a manufacturer of mobile and prefabricated concrete plants. It is clear that there are few buyers of his products, but the settings that the sites provide allow you to bring a stable number of target consumers to the client’s website. Moreover, the advertising campaign budget remains low, and the results are effective.

Site selection

As I said earlier, today there are three main providers of contextual advertising - Yandex.Direct, Google.Adword and Begun. The audience is more or less balanced everywhere, the only difference is in the nuances. It is believed that the Google platform is chosen by the younger generation with a technical bent, Yandex is used by people of the middle generation, and the older generation prefers Rambler.

In addition, advertising opportunities are actively developing on the social networks VKontakte and Facebook. An undoubted advantage of social media is its approach to reaching an audience. If the advantage of contextual advertising is that customers are identified by their queries, which they enter into the search bar, then here, thanks to the personal data voluntarily provided by participants, it is possible to target the display of ads by gender, age, marital status, position, interests and many other parameters, up to the mobile operator you are using.

Saving your budget is not about cutting down on clicks and reducing sales and profits. You can reduce the cost of contextual advertising and at the same time increase its effectiveness. We tell you how this can be done.

Ways to save your advertising budget in Ads and Direct

1. Find and activate various promotional codes.

2. Optimize your ads.

Testing headlines, descriptions and images, using extensions, creating separate mobile ads and removing underperforming ones can all, together with optimizing your landing pages, help reduce your cost per click.

3. Improve the semantic core.

Collecting new relevant keywords and phrases, tracking non-topical ones and adding them to negative keywords means paying less for untargeted traffic to the site. The easiest manual way to collect keys is to use Yandex.Wordstat.

However, all of the above ways to save money are unpredictable. You may accidentally make a mistake: for example, add an irrelevant keyword or add a relevant one to the list of negative keywords. And in some topics - real estate, loans, drug addiction - it is unlikely that it will be possible to reduce the cost per click at all, since there is huge competition there.

Top 20 most expensive keywords and phrases in Yandex according to Origami data:

Top 20 most expensive keywords and phrases in Google Ads according to Origami data:

Nevertheless, there is a guaranteed option to save your budget, or rather, to return part of the advertising costs spent on Yandex.Direct and Google Ads. This opportunity is provided by .

How much can you get when running contextual advertising through Click.ru:

• 1% - if the monthly advertising budget is less than 20,000 rubles.
• 4% - for expenses on Direct and Ads from 20 to 50,000 rubles.
• 8% - maximum percentage - for monthly expenses over 50,000 rubles.

Important: Unlike other systems that offer this, click.ru does not charge an additional commission when replenishing your balance and withdrawing funds. And you can transfer the saved money to an electronic wallet - WebMoney, QIWI or Yandex.Money - starting from one thousand rubles.

Automation tools - to improve advertising efficiency

We have already mentioned that optimizing your ads - and the advertising campaign as a whole - leads to an increase in click-through rates and, therefore, a decrease in the cost per click. However, there is a risk of making mistakes and vice versa - reducing CTR and increasing CPC.

To prevent the influence of the human factor, as well as save time on optimization, it is good to use automation systems.

When choosing a platform for managing contextual advertising, you need to pay attention to the following characteristics:

• List of automation tools and their availability (how much does access cost, what are the conditions of use - paid / free, period, etc.).
• List of advertising systems that you can work with (some systems are paid, although they can only work with Direct).
• Ease of use (can usually be understood after activating the free trial period). Including the ease of transferring advertising campaigns, settings, etc.
• Availability of bonuses for users and commissions for deposits or withdrawals (some systems seem to charge a reward, but if you withdraw it, it turns out more expensive).

The optimal solution is the Click.ru service, a platform for automation and management of contextual advertising. Register and transfer advertising campaigns - you get unlimited and absolutely free access to tools such as:

• Autobidder.
• UTM marker.
• Media planner/key picker.
• Ad builder from YML.
• Report Wizard.

If you encounter any difficulties with any tool, you can look at the F.A.Q. or contact technical support.

Click.ru - for automation and savings

— Link your Yandex.Direct and Google Ads accounts, and then transfer the campaigns under the control of the system.

— Top up your account from a card, e-wallet or the balance of your mobile phone. Or transfer money by bank transfer.

We remind you that there is no commission for replenishment.

— Withdraw income as needed. The minimum amount for withdrawal is 1,000 rubles.

The experiment began with work on one of the campaigns for the Mac family - iMac laptops and all-in-one PCs. Since there was little time, we postponed automation until later and started making improvements manually.

We assembled a new semantic core automatically, then manually filtered it and divided the advertising account into 9 areas:

Yandex.Direct

Search engine by model
Search engine by category
YAN by category
Retargeting with different conditions

Google Ads

Search engine by model
Search engine by category
KMS/DSK for categories
Remarketing
Dynamic remarketing

In retargeting, we identified several audiences (before this it was simply “who was on the site”), including:

• people who visited the MacBook/iMac categories;
• visited specific product cards;
• added an item to your cart, but didn't buy it.

Then we rewrote the ad texts for each direction - about 300 unique ad texts. The setup took a week, the test campaign lasted a month.

The result was an increase in the ROI of contextual advertising to 316%. The client was pleased with the first results and commissioned us to improve the entire campaign, including iPhone, iPad and other categories.

Second block: doing selective automation

Expanding the campaign across the entire range, we again started by revising the semantic core. Typically for electronics, the emphasis is on ads for specific models (“apple macbook air”, “macbook pro”).

Without abandoning this tactic, we supplemented the core with a large number of queries that intersect with filtering on the site - color, amount of internal memory, and the like (“apple macbook air core i5”, “macbook pro 15 256gb”, “iphone 6 16gb silver” ). This yielded an additional 1,000 or so highly relevant ads.

iPhone Search Demand

Example of graphic and smart banners

Third block: improvements based on analytics data

We used the accumulated data to further optimize the campaign.

Firstly, the client entrusted us with improving the analytics system on the website. We started counting one-click purchases and installment purchases, assigning a ruble value to these actions, since they are not included in e-commerce reports.

Secondly, having understood the specifics of the client’s goods, we were able to enable automated bid management. For the Direct campaign we chose the K50 Statistics + Rules solution, for Adwords - a combination of K50 Statistics, a built-in conversion optimizer and Adwords automatic rules.

Everyone who works with business processes knows that you can’t automate a mess—you first need to put things in order in the enterprise. Likewise, you can’t automate your bidding strategy right away—you first need to understand which queries to compete for. The data from the previous stages allowed us to add several effective moves to the bet management strategy, for example:

• We increased the share of ad impressions in special placements, where the ROI was more than 300%.
• We've increased bids on ads that contribute to assisted conversions (which may look useless when looking at just the last click, but are actually quite effective).
• We are gradually reducing bids (in 10% weekly increments) for ads that show low ROI and do not participate in associated conversions.

• Targeting by device worked well - for those who are looking for Apple products with an iPhone, etc. This is a simple but effective way to find loyal brand fans;
• We made several audience segments based on the mailing list. For example, we separated into a separate segment those email addresses whose owners had not opened the newsletter for a long time. For such “cooling down” clients, we raised rates in order to reactivate them.

results

After three months of work, the campaign showed the following ROI results while maintaining or increasing profitability:

• Average ROI - 450%
• Peak ROI for Yandex.Direct - 547%
• Peak ROI for Google Ads - 776%

Monthly dynamics in Yandex.Direct

Monthly dynamics in Google Ads

Most novice advertisers think that nothing is easier than setting up contextual advertising. Well, really, what’s difficult, I wrote several ads, selected keywords and that’s it, the advertising works! But in reality everything turns out to be much more complicated. If you already know what it is, or don’t want to waste your advertising budget, then this article is for you. In it, I will go through the main stages of developing an advertising campaign and tell you which of them are most important to control if you order contextual advertising setup from a specialist.

So, let's say you already realized that setting up contextual advertising is not as easy as you thought at first. And you decided to entrust the advertising campaign to a specialist. But this does not mean that you should step aside and be happy that a specialist will do everything for you. It is you, the entrepreneur who takes the risks, who first of all needs to take part in setting up advertising campaigns and control every step of the advertising specialist.

Setting up contextual advertising: 12 stages of developing an advertising campaign

1. Analysis of the target audience. This is the main stage, without it it is impossible to conduct an effective advertising campaign that will bring the right visitors to your website. At this stage, the contextual advertising specialist should ask you a number of questions about your clients, your target audience. And based on the responses received, identify the core, those visitors to whom advertising activity will be directed.

2. Competitor analysis. Here you can also help an advertising specialist. No one knows their competitors, their strengths and weaknesses better than you. Tell him everything you know, give him competitors’ websites. In addition, the specialist must check the competition for advertising results and highlight the most interesting ad texts. In the future, this will help you write ads that will attract the attention of your target audience and put your competitors to shame.

3. Determining the goals of the advertising campaign. At this stage, you need to understand what exactly you want from your advertising campaign. For example, this could be an increase in website traffic, an increase in sales, or an increase in brand awareness. But all these goals are long-term and too general.

First of all, goals need to be specified. The easiest and most effective way to do this is to use the technology goal setting method. The decoding of this abbreviation sounds like this Specific(specificity) —Measurable(measurability) -Attainable(reachability) —Relevant(relevance) -Time based(certainty in time). Those. If you formulate the goal “increase website traffic” using technology, it may sound like this: By February 20, increase the number of transitions to the site by 2 times . Or by February 20, get 2000 hits to the site . As you can see, the goal of the advertising campaign is clearly measurable, and it will be easy for you to see its achievement.

But there is one BUT. If you have never used contextual advertising to promote your business, then the very first goal will be to determine how suitable this traffic source is for your website/product/service. Those. in the case of the example above, the goal might sound something like this: Until February 20, find out how many visitors to the site we can receive from advertising with a budget of 1000 UAH per day . And if the cost of attracting 1 visitor suits you, then you can set an advertising specialist a specific goal to increase the number of visitors or reduce the cost of 1 visitor from advertising.

4. Landing page analysis. Generally speaking, at this stage, a specialist can, based on his experience, give recommendations for improving the pages to which advertising traffic will go. And you can immediately use the knowledge gained at the stage of competitor analysis.

5. Selection of the basis of the semantic core. What is the basis of the semantic core? These are the basic broad words that can describe your product. For example, if you sell water treatment systems, then the basis for collecting the semantic core can be words such as iron removal, softening, water treatment, etc. Here you should help a specialist with a primary list of keywords. Perhaps your product/service has specific slang names that are known only in narrow circles. Tell your advertising specialist about this.

6. Collecting keywords and negative keywords. This stage can be roughly divided into 2. First, a specialist, based on the basis of the semantic core, collects a list of keywords and negative words (those that are not targeted for your advertising campaign). Then you need to look through all the keywords to remove unnecessary ones, which may also be non-target. The fact is that an advertising specialist should not understand the nuances of your product or service, and most likely does not know for sure whether this or that word will be target for your audience or not. Therefore, he should always send a list of selected keywords for approval.

7. Sorting keywords. Here the specialist sorts the keywords into hot, warm and near-target. Roughly speaking, into the most targeted, targeted and least targeted. Here, too, I recommend looking through at least one eye to see if everything is correct in your opinion.

8. Writing advertisements. Let an advertising specialist show you several ad copy options. Your task is to check that the ad is understandable to the target audience. But remember that the advertising specialist usually knows well how to write a clickable ad that will attract the attention of users, so listen to his recommendations if he insists on something.

10. Setting primary rates. This work is based on studying competitors' rates and your sales funnel. Usually it is enough to name the amount you are willing to spend to complete the target action on the site. And based on the conversion of your site, a specialist can calculate what maximum bid he can allow to set in his account.

11. Passing moderation. Your participation may include providing copies of necessary documents if requested by the moderators.

Yandex Direct is the largest contextual advertising network in Russia; only Google AdWords can compete with it. Contextual advertising allows you to quickly attract visitors to your site; you only pay for clicks on ads. Creating and further managing an advertising campaign is not too complicated, however, there are a number of nuances that you need to know. They help make your advertising campaigns in Yandex Direct more effective from an economic point of view.

Why do businesses need Direct? There are several answers:

• Contextual advertising in general and Yandex Direct in particular is the most effective type of advertising that allows you to attract the required number of customers;
• Targeted traffic can be received already on the first day of your website’s operation, unlike search engine promotion;
• You can customize your targeting to show your ads only to your target audience, which is a must for some businesses.

Principle of operation

For simplicity, I will briefly and step-by-step describe the operating principle of Ya.D. As an example, let's take a company that sells airline tickets.

1. The company creates its ad;
2. The company selects targeted queries for the ad;
3. The user enters a search query;
4. Yandex shows him an ad that matches the user’s interests, which is why advertising is called contextual;
5. The user comes to the site and buys a ticket;
6. An alternative option: the user reads an article about the country on a site where he is shown an ad, since this site is a Yandex partner.

In search results, ads look like this:

On the site it will be like this:

Yandex.Direct plays the role of a link between the client and the company. Considering Yandex's share among search engines (more than 50%), the audience is huge. Moreover, the share of those who not only search for information on goods and services on the Internet, but also buy them there, is also growing. Contextual advertising provides opportunities that modern businesses should not ignore.

Choose “Professional”, as this option gives you more options for customizing your advertising campaign. If you do not have a country set in your Yandex settings, you will be asked for this data when creating a campaign in Yandex Direct. Next you will be asked to provide other personal data, everything is simple. As you can see, you can even connect SMS notifications.

Strategy allows you to choose a scheme for displaying ads; there are manual strategies, and there are fully automatic ones. There are 11 strategies in total; in Direct you can read their descriptions and choose what suits you. Most of all there are automatic strategies that allow you to choose an option depending on your current tasks. This could be maximum efficiency in terms of clicks and costs, maximum traffic, or other types. Start with the “Highest Available Position”, this is the optimal strategy for beginners. I'll talk more about strategies below.

They provide the opportunity to increase or decrease the cost per click for a specific audience. There are three adjustment options:

• Gender and age;
• For mobile;
• For those who have already visited the site.

You can install them at any time, so you can skip this point at first, it is not so important.

Time targeting allows you to set the display time for ads. Everything is simple here, I won’t give advice, you yourself must know at what time you need clients. You can set up a show at any hour and any day of the week. If the time when a visitor visits your site matters to your site, then this settings item cannot be skipped. Sometimes it happens that part of the budget is wasted at night or on weekends.

Advanced geographic targeting is also a useful feature, but not for everyone. It allows you to show your ads to users from other regions, but only if they specify your region in the request. It is recommended to leave the checkbox, and for some sites this is absolutely necessary. For example, it is logical to display the request “Hotels in Kazan” in any region. But “order a bathhouse in Kazan” needs to be shown only in Kazan; it is obvious that the effectiveness of such an ad in any other region will be zero.

Single display region for all ads allows you to manually set the geography of your advertising. In some advertising campaigns, this is necessary to increase efficiency and to identify the target audience by geography.

Single address and telephone allows you to create a virtual business card for your company, where you can specify various data, from opening hours and phone number, to metro station and email. It is not necessary to fill in all data.

Now let's look at the following settings that complete the creation of an advertising campaign in Yandex.Direct, after which you can move on to creating ads and adding keywords.

They allow you to specify words that, if present in a search query, will not show your ad. Words are added there that may bring in a non-target audience. That is, the main task of negative keywords is to exclude the display of ads for information requests, leaving only commercial ones.

Allows you to configure the display of ads on sites that are members of the Yandex Advertising Network. The settings depend on what products or services you offer. For some, traffic from the search results page is better, while for others, traffic from topical sites is better. Especially when it comes to expensive and specific products. If you check “do not take into account user preferences,” then the ads will be thematic to the site page on which they will be displayed.

By default, there will be behavioral targeting, which takes into account the interests of the user, and not the subject of the site. If the user was looking for air tickets, Yandex will remember this and will show him relevant ads on all partner sites where behavioral targeting is allowed.

I’ll talk about impressions for additional relevant phrases below, but leave everything at default for now. The function will not work if Yandex.Metrica is not connected.

Site monitoring must be enabled (requires connection to Metrica). If your site goes offline, the advertising campaign will be stopped. If you run ads at night and on weekends, then you cannot do without this function. Below you can add a Yandex.Metrica counter.

Link markup will add tags to the url with the click number and transmit the data to Yandex.Metrica. The feature is useful and worth enabling.

Creating an ad

The Mobile Ad checkbox allows you to create an ad to display on mobile devices. For mobile phones, it is better to create separate ads that have their own specifics. If you skip this point, Yandex will independently convert your regular ad for mobile devices.

Heading must reflect the essence of the ad and must contain a key phrase. Are you involved in website promotion? He will write “Website promotion throughout Russia.” The title is limited to 33 characters, including spaces.

Announcement text can be up to 75 characters long. The text should:

• Contain a call to action;
• Contain a key phrase;
• It may contain the words “discount”, “promotion”, etc. (if such services are available on your site), for users they are an additional factor that encourages them to click on the ad.

You can also add images, however, there is a minimum cost per click limit for such ads; in my example, I will not add an image. You can also add quick links:

I added links to the “Services” and “Prices” pages; if you have pages on your site where a visitor can immediately get what he needs, it’s worth adding quick links. They often increase the click-through rate of your ad.

Clarifications– an additional line in which you can indicate competitive advantages. They will be shown only in the first special placement and when viewed from a PC. They must also first undergo moderation; this is necessary so that Yandex employees can check whether the stated information is true. I'll skip that now.

Address and telephone– will allow you to specify contact information for the advertisement with the ability to add advertisements for display on Yandex.Maps. It is recommended to specify.

So, I ended up with a declaration like this:

This is how it will appear in search results. You can see other options, as well as how it will look on mobile devices. At this stage, the most difficult thing is to compose a good text, since you need to indicate maximum information in a minimum of characters. The text should be informative and make you want to click on the ad. But you need to be careful, because if you deceive users, you will have a large number of “empty” clicks without real results and failures on the site.

Keywords for ads

Yandex Direct gives you a tool for selecting keywords. This is an important stage that needs to be approached very seriously. We are interested in website promotion, so we enter this phrase and immediately see the tips:

I marked in yellow what I will add, since all these keys correspond to the services that my company provides. You can go the other way and click “Select”, then the following window will appear:

It is better to use this method, since the number of impressions is also displayed here. But you shouldn’t ignore the hints either. In this example, I will not add a lot of key phrases, my task is to explain the basic principles. But choosing the right keywords can greatly affect the effectiveness of your ads.

This example explains the principles of creating ads; in fact, this is not what you need to do. The fact is that for each group of keywords you need to create a separate ad. That is, making one ad with a lot of keywords (as in the example) is a mistake. In my example, separate ads need to be created for the phrases that are highlighted in yellow. This approach will increase CTR and reduce the cost per click, which I will discuss below.

In the negative words I will indicate the following:

These words will prevent ads from being shown to those who are looking for information and most likely will not order anything. Again, there are few negative keywords in this example; in fact, there are many more. I will leave the retargeting conditions unchanged, I will leave the display region as “Russia”, since I need clients from any city. I have a separate article about retargeting.

I will not touch the rate adjustment in this example. They allow you to set a price for a specific audience. For example, if you believe that men 25-35 years old will be your best audience, you can adjust your bids so that the cost per click for this group will be higher. I will also not set labels in this example.

As you can see, some settings duplicate the settings of the advertising campaign, so it is better to specify them there, so as not to enter them again each time. At any time, you can change the settings of both the entire advertising campaign in Yandex.Direct and a separate ad group.

This is where we finish creating the ad group and move on to choosing bids.

Setting prices per click

Yandex.Direct will automatically show us prices. Here are the things you need to know:

• Special placement – ​​top of the page;
• Guarantee – impressions at the bottom of the page.

Ads that are located at the top of the page get much more traffic, but they cost more. Sometimes there are situations where a warranty can be more expensive than a special placement, but this is rare. This happens due to poor ad settings; this is a kind of punishment from Yandex.

I get this picture:

Don’t be alarmed by high prices, it’s just a matter of keywords and the fact that the display region is not configured. It is clear that there is a lot of competition for such a request throughout Russia, which is why the price is so high.

Yandex.Direct works on the principle of an auction. Whoever paid the most will be shown the ad. It can be seen that upon request “seo promotion”, entrance to special accommodation costs 2,500 rubles (this is the maximum possible price). If the price is a little lower, then my ad will be shown when there are no other advertisers who will outbid my bid. If there are such advertisers, then your ad will not appear on the page in the search results, but on partner sites. The prices there are lower than in search results.

To display on partner sites, you also need to create separate ads in Yandex.Direct. In them, disable impressions in search, and in search ads, disable impressions on partner sites.

However, the price of 2,500 rubles per click does not suit me, so I will do what I said above, namely, create an ad for a different group of keywords and indicate the region.

It can be seen that the price has become much lower. This is why you need to create separate ads for different groups of keywords. In addition, such ads will have a higher CTR than those for general phrases. Yes, negative keywords allow you to exclude information requests, but you can’t provide for everything.

After you click “Save”, you will be redirected to the next page, where Yandex.Direct will show the productivity of the ads based on its own assessment. Productivity is calculated based on many factors, but in general, the higher this indicator, the more effective your ad is in terms of price and quality.

It can be seen that the second key phrase has higher productivity, simply because the region in this case is “Republic of Tatarstan”. Also pay attention to “site promotion” - the price for the specified region is 5 times lower than without this option. That is, if you need to collect traffic from all over the country, then you:

• Create ad groups using keywords;
• Create groups for different regions.

In my case, you can display the request “website promotion” in 10 regions and create a separate ad for each, but an ad with the heading “website promotion + region” will be more effective.

Next, the ad must be sent for moderation. Its speed depends on the number of ads, pages to navigate to and the volume of keywords. Moderation of an ad in Yandex.Direct rarely lasts longer than 48 hours; usually a response comes within a day. If the verification takes longer, do not hesitate and contact the support service, they have a feedback function.

About choosing a display strategy

By default, we left the "Highest available position" strategy, it will show your ads in the highest positions, but the cost of transition will be maximum. Sometimes you need to choose a different strategy, here I will give some tips.

If you are interested in traffic at a minimum price, then select “Display in a block at a minimum price.” For this, you can also select “Weekly package of clicks,” where you can specify the required number of clicks, as well as set the maximum price.

“Average cost per click” allows you to get the maximum number of clicks; in this case, you can specify expenses per week, and Yandex.Direct will set the rate automatically. “Weekly budget” also allows you to set a spending budget for the week, but you can also set conversion by goals using the connected Yandex.Metrica.

“Independent management” allows you to display your ads only on thematic platforms; the screenshot shows that I disabled their display in search results. In fact, there is nothing complicated in these strategies, but it is difficult to say which is the only profitable one, because each advertising campaign is individual. Experiments will help you understand what is more profitable for you, during which the most effective strategies will be identified.

Direct Commander

Direct Commander helps in managing large campaigns; it will be useful if you have several campaigns. You can download it from this link. The program is useful and really makes working in Yandex.Direct easier. If you have several advertisements, then you can do without it, but if there are dozens or hundreds of them, then you cannot do without the Commander.

To log in, enter your Yandex credentials, then click “Get campaigns” and Direct Commander will automatically download all the data. Also click on "Get Groups" and "Get Announcements". It can be seen that working in this program is more convenient than in the web interface, since here you can switch between campaigns and ads instantly.

Here you can also create, edit, send for moderation, disable and enable the display of ads, that is, all the functionality of the Yandex.Direct web interface is preserved. But, in my opinion, it is somewhat more convenient to create ads in the web interface.

A/B tests in Commander

Direct Commander is good because it makes it easy to conduct A/B testing (otherwise it can be called split tests). Their essence is to test ads with different settings to identify the best result. A/B tests in contextual advertising (and not only) are a very useful tool, without which only a person with extensive experience can create a truly effective campaign. But experienced people also use split tests.

Testing different ads in Direct Commander is very easy. First, select the already created ad and simply copy and paste it (right click).

• Ad text and headings;
• Display address
• Absence or presence of address, price, phone number, quick links.

Sometimes it happens that just one word in the text can greatly change the CTR of an ad, so try different options and choose the best ones. This is especially necessary when the budget for an advertising campaign is large; here it is simply profitable to spend part of the funds on A/B testing.

About ad moderation

• Advertising of products that cannot be advertised or are legally prohibited for distribution;
• Use contact information or company logos in images;
• CAPITAL letters in text or title.

For a number of products you will need to provide supporting documents (certificates, licenses). There is a whole category of goods and services, such as pyrotechnics, medicines, passenger transportation, insurance, etc. The full list, as well as the required documents, can be found.

If you receive a refusal, correct the indicated errors and resubmit your ad for moderation.

Budget forecast

Contextual advertising does not require a frivolous approach; you need to plan your budget. Ideally, you should understand how many visitors you need to attract and how many of them you need to become customers. These are clear goals that need to be set. There is a separate tool for budget forecasting. It can be used even before creating ads and an advertising campaign.

You also enter a list of key phrases, and Yandex will calculate the number of visitors and the amount you will pay to attract them. I note that this data is relative, because prices can change, advertisers can leave and come, which affects the cost. I got it like this:

I chose “Special Placement”, it is clear that I will have to spend 3453 rubles, which will attract about 388 visitors to the site. These data allow you to roughly estimate the budget, but it will always differ, it can be either a plus or a minus. After all, Yandex cannot accurately predict the CTR of each ad; it can only derive approximate indicators based on its data and statistics.

It can be seen that the phrase “Website promotion in Kazan” has a question mark. This means that Yandex cannot predict the budget for this phrase, since there are very few requests there. You shouldn’t pay attention to this; such ads can be very effective.

Evaluating the effectiveness of Yandex Direct

There are many metrics that track the effectiveness of contextual advertising in Yandex.Direct. This:

• Conversion rate;
• Behavioral factors of attracted visitors and other data.

Of course, the most important thing for a business is financial performance. Yandex.Direct is not a panacea that will definitely bring you clients. No, there will be customers, but if the cost of attracting them is more than you earn from them, then what is the point of contextual advertising?

Yes, for a number of companies Y.D. can be the main source of clients, but small companies that operate in a competitive environment must look for other ways. You’ve seen the prices in the example of “Site Promotion”, it’s really expensive, but only if you don’t delve into the settings.

It is impossible to tell everything about Yandex Direct and contextual advertising in one article; there are a lot of nuances, I will talk about them in other articles. But, I think that after reading this article, you are no longer new to Yandex Direct and will be able to use this effective tool to attract visitors and clients.