Stages of creating contextual advertising. Creating and launching contextual advertising: everyone starts somewhere How to make contextual advertising effective

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A long time ago, when Lenya Golubkov advertised vodka and “MMM” on my grandmother’s black-and-white TV, my grandfather started a real business, created capital and famously dealt with competitors by selling brooms at the market.

He didn’t know then either about the existence of the Internet, or, especially, about contextual advertising on it. Therefore, he quickly got tired of promoting his product on his own, and he was finished with entrepreneurial activity.

Now everything has changed dramatically: computers no longer weigh as much as a teenager, competitors are no longer rolled into concrete, and online advertisements have turned into an effective tool for getting customers and increasing sales.

Today we will talk about how To create attractive contextual advertising, we will explain in simple words how to create ads, set up everything that can be configured, and much more.

How to make contextual advertising if before this you have only made mistakes in your own life?

Incredibly, we have come to the end

Ivan Tseluev

Instead of a conclusion, I will allow myself a few metaphors.

If you imagine that the creation and launch of contextual advertising is an iceberg, then today we have only seen the tip of it. If you don’t want to go to the bottom when you come face to face with it, just like the Titanic, be able to timely and correctly assess its size. This will help you decide what you can do yourself and what to entrust to specialists.

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.

The company creates its ad;
The company selects targeted queries for the ad;
The user enters a search query;
Yandex shows him an ad that matches the user’s interests, which is why advertising is called contextual;
The user comes to the site and buys a ticket;
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 a crucial 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-quality ratio.

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.

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Then it’s probably important for you to get a return from it in the form of orders from the site or calls. Therefore, the landing page for contextual advertising is of paramount importance; we can safely say that this is its main element. All landing pages are divided into 2 types:

Effective
Ineffective

A video of an author presenting his offer to users increases the loyalty and trust of subscribers
Video allows you to convey more information to your audience than just landing page text.

A word of caution: Only a video that exudes confidence and charisma will be beneficial. Vague, uncertain phrases read in a boring voice will only push people away.

Feature six: audio

Tip seven: call to action

A call to action is a required element of a capture page. Its goal is to push a person to take certain actions, which, in fact, is the task of the page: to provide effectiveness of contextual advertising. It is better to place a call to action before the subscription form.

Tip eight: bulleted lists

Bulleted lists are very convenient for understanding information. They list the details of your proposals.

The higher the specificity and emphasis in the lists, the higher the user response
Information must be clear and concise. Nobody needs “water”.

Chip nine: bonus

Simply commanding “fetch” is not enough for the reader. We still need to give him some sugar. If each new subscriber can receive a gift, albeit small, this will be the best incentive for further cooperation.

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