Contextual advertising in Yandex.Direct can be set up even if you are not a professional. It is unlikely that you will be able to configure high-quality advertising campaign right away, but if you follow the advice in this article, you will succeed no worse, if not better than your competitors.

There are a lot of lessons and courses on the Internet on setting up Yandex.Direct. If you plan to continue to conduct advertising campaigns yourself, then it is better to study the original source - the Yandex.Direct help http://direct.yandex.ru/help/, almost everything is there and for free. 90% of articles and courses on the Internet are a retelling of official information.

But if you have very little time, then this article will help.

The essence of contextual advertising.

Contextual advertising allows an advertiser to display their ads in response to phrases people enter into the search bar. And setting up advertising consists of choosing phrases for which to display ads and composing these same ads. Moreover, the ads should lead to the relevant pages on your website.

• Demand (need)- a phrase that a person enters into a search engine. For example, “buy a press machine.” That is, it is obvious that a person wants to buy an exercise machine and we understand which one (for the press).
• Offer is your ad that is shown in response to this phrase. For our example, it is correct to show an ad whose essence is: “We have abdominal exercise machines, we sell them.”
• And again offer- this is the page on your website where the ad leads. When a person clicks on an ad, he is taken to a page with a description of the abdominal machine (or a catalog of such machines)

You must have a good understanding of what needs your offer is aimed at in order to choose the right phrases to display your ads.

And yet, search engines are used by tens of millions of people every day. You must understand that your ad will be seen by a lot of people, and your ad may be shown thousands of times a day. Therefore, mistakes in advertising campaigns very quickly take away your advertising budget.

Your task is to cover only the demand for which you have supply.

Basic mistakes of newbies

And the main mistakes that beginners make are related to a lack of understanding of the essence of advertising and laziness. These errors prevent supply and demand from meeting:

• Selected to display ads too general phrases, which do not contain a formulated need. For example, for our case, the phrases “exercise machine”, “sports”, “ideal abs” are not suitable, because It is unknown what a person is generally looking for and whether he is going to buy, and we only deal with abdominal exercise equipment.
• Selected phrases that formulate an imprecise need, which makes it impossible to understand whether this is your client or not. For example, the phrase “buy a trainer” doesn’t suit us either, because there are different types of trainers, but we advertise for the abs.
• In the ad text no clear proposal. For example, if our only product is an ab roller, then we CAN write in the ad that we are selling an “abs trainer.” But then people who are looking for other types of exercise equipment will also click on it. And we pay for every click. It’s better to immediately write “We are selling an ab roller.”
• Well, the worst mistake - no landing page. If a person clicks on our advertisement, then he expects to see what is said in the advertisement. In our case, he expects to see prices, photos and descriptions of the simulator. And if he gets to home page a site with just news from the world of sports?

Again. Your ad should reflect the essence of your offer and should appear in response to phrases that indicate that a person is your client. If you run vague, overly general ads in response to overly general phrases, people will click on your ads, and you'll have to pay for those clicks.

Imagine an example. A person enters the request “I want to buy something.” And you show him an ad “buy something from us.” He clicks on the advertisement and it turns out that you sell cement, and he wanted a bicycle. You paid money for the click, but the client left.

Where to find phrases to display ads

The easiest way is the service http://wordstat.yandex.ru/. There you enter words and see what people searched for with those words. These are the phrases from which you need to choose.

Most quick way choose phrases and avoid mistakes, this is preliminary.

Please note that the numbers opposite the words are the total number of impressions of ALL PHRASES CONTAINING THIS WORD. To find out the exact number of impressions of a particular phrase or word, you need to put them in quotation marks " ". This is very important.

For example, the phrase “buy a trainer” gets about 50 thousand impressions. And the phrase “buy an abdominal exercise machine” is about 1 thousand. More impressions means that more people They will see your ad, but we have already discussed that we do not need such impressions and unnecessary clicks. In addition, if an ad is often shown, but is not clicked on (if your ad is well formulated, is shown using a very general phrase and people immediately understand that this is not what they were looking for), then the cost per click begins to increase (more on this another time) .

Well, now some tips if you decide to advertise in Yandex.Direct

• Be sure to use the professional interface (you can choose during registration). If you find it difficult to understand, read the help section. If you don’t want to figure it out, it’s better not to spend money, but hire someone.
• Don't forget to indicate the time and region of the advertising campaign. It is advisable to create your own advertising campaign for each city (different cities have different cost per click and you can adjust the click for each city separately, otherwise you will have to set the cost for the most expensive city)
• Place key phrases in quotation marks " " to limit the display of ads specifically for a given phrase. You can do without quotes, but then you need to exclude ad impressions.
• Choose phrases consisting of several words (preferably 3-4), usually such phrases contain a clearly formulated need and you can show a specific proposal.
• Only one ad per phrase! This allows you to create your own ad for each specific phrase and improve it in the future. For each need formulated in one phrase, it is advisable to make your own advertisement with an offer for this need.
• Use words from the keyword phrase in the ad title, then when the ad is displayed, matching words will be highlighted in bold text.
• To make your offer truly clear, use prices, terms, model, and delivery regions in your advertisements. Then truly interested people will come to you.
• Track statistics every day. If a certain phrase is gaining impressions very quickly and there are few clicks on it, then you have taken too general a phrase and your ad does not correspond to what people are looking for.

A win-win option for setting up Direct for a beginner

This advice is for those who don’t understand anything at all and are afraid to waste money.

Choose only one phrase to display your advertising, but one that makes it immediately clear that a person is ready to spend money (phrases with the words “buy”, “order”). Make an ad that will make the person immediately understand that you will help him. Run advertising, look at the results. Then add one new phrase every day and write a new ad for each phrase.

Track the statistics and in a few days you will understand how contextual advertising works and you will be able to add more phrases and ads.

Issue #119. Where to start studying contextual advertising?

If you decide to plan and control a contextual advertising campaign yourself, it is better to start with knowledge. It all starts with general idea about the mechanism. Over time, your knowledge will only grow stronger. For now, we offer you a few questions that you should get answers to first.

Where to work?

• What is contextual advertising and how Yandex.Direct works

How to create a list of keywords and negative keywords?

Exactly keyword is a condition for your ad to be shown. You need to work out all the combinations and variations so as not to miss out on potential customers. No less important are “negative words”, that is, specific conditions under which your offer should not be shown.

• Effective semantic core - subtleties of composition

How to test?

To ensure the effectiveness of ads for an advertising campaign, you need to conduct testing. This will save your money and improve the performance of your contextual advertising campaign.

How to create advertisements?

A well-written ad is the basis of a successful advertising campaign. There are rules that must be followed, and certain subtleties that affect the quality of the ad. You can read about this in. Additionally, you should know how to make routine tasks easier. For this purpose, a contextual advertising specialist will need Microsoft Excel.

You can create ads using automated services based on popular templates. Generation saves a lot of time and takes this task off your hands.

• How to create an effective advertisement according to Yandex.Direct
• Increasing the click-through rate of contextual advertising

How does the auction work?

Understanding the mechanism of the contextual advertising auction entails understanding the formation of the cost per click and successful participation in it. What is the relationship between CTR and the cost per click or placement above? Understanding these points can save you money.

How to use the context network?

You can determine on which sites of the Yandex or Google network your ad will be shown. Payment is made only for transitions to your site, i.e. real traffic.

• Yandex.Direct - contextual advertising placement system

How to set up and manage an advertising campaign?

It’s not enough to make a list of keywords and write an ad. You must clearly understand what results you want to achieve. To do this, you will need to decide on targeting, strategy and display criteria.

• Contextual advertising: tools, settings, operating rules
• How to set up an effective context in an hour. Checklist for the busiest
• 15 recommendations for a successful contextual advertising campaign

What should your landing page be?

The keyword or click shown does not sell the product. What sells your website is the landing page, which must be “ready” to convince a potential buyer.

How to analyze?

First of all, you need to remember two tools - Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics. It is from the results that you see here that you can form an opinion about how successful and profitable it is.

• Google.Analitics and Yandex.Metrica: compare, use, choose

Why do you need remarketing?

What should I do if a user clicked on an ad but did not proceed? Use retargeting (remarketing) to make him a buyer. Ours was dedicated to him.

• Google AdWords Remarketing Magic: How to Get Better Contextual Results?

How to save your budget?

If you know how to manage bids during an advertising campaign, your budget will be worth the investment. You can and even need to learn this.

How to automate processes?

You can use services to automate the selection of keywords, negative keywords, ad creation, bid management, etc. However, it makes sense to first delve into the mechanism to understand whether it works correctly.

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. It's simple but effective way 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

Based on the results of 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

Hello friends.

In this article, we will learn how to properly make Yandex Direct contextual advertising yourself. Moreover, we will do this completely free of charge, and without the help of so-called “professionals”.

Of course, if you wish, you can trust him to set up contextual advertising. But I would still advise you to first figure out for yourself what it is and how it works. This way you can at least have quality control over the performers.

And first, let's deal with basic concepts contextual advertising.

Choosing an advertising strategy

The first thing you need to do is choose a strategy. Contextual advertising, in fact, comes in two forms. different types. The first type is search contextual advertising, and the second is YAN (Yandex Advertising Network).

Both of these systems are configured in the Yandex Direct interface, but they are completely different - from the strategy for selecting keywords to setting bids per click.

YAN, on the contrary, is shown to people even if they have never looked for anything like that. They just visited sites on similar topics, or were interested in something similar. We (or rather Yandex) identify these people based on behavioral factors and show them our advertising.

Search contextual advertising is more converting. This means that people who come to you from a search are more likely to buy your product than YAN visitors. And this is natural, because these people themselves searched for what you offer. In the case of YAN, people themselves are not looking for anything specifically.

We try to quickly interest them and warm them up practically from scratch. And therefore the conversion numbers there will be much lower.

Which advertising should you choose if you have no money?

The Yandex Direct auction system is gradually raising and raising bids. And for some particularly competitive queries, the cost per click has already reached the maximum allowed value of 2500 rubles.

Of course, there are options to pay less than competitors (see below). But in general, you can’t escape the cost per click rate. If it is said, you have to pay at least 30 rubles. per click so that your ads appear on the search results page, you will be forced to pay for them.

In YAN everything is a little different. There, the cost per click depends only on you and your budget. You can bet 10 rubles. per click, and 3 rubles. per click. This will only affect the speed of dialing the required number of clicks. You can find out more in the article “How to set up YAN yourself.”

If people almost never directly search for your product, and you first need to “make them want it,” or if you don’t yet have enough money to fight competitors in search advertising, look at how best to use YAN.

Of course, there are also options for using YAN for retargeting and enhancing search advertising. But that's for another time.

How to pay less for advertising than competitors

There are very specific indicators of “well-done” contextual advertising - you pay less per click than your competitors. At the same time, you get much more clicks than these same competitors. And besides, you get a higher percentage of sales from your clicks.

All this becomes possible thanks to the correct selection of keywords and correct drafting ad. See how this happens in Yandex Direct search contextual advertising.

Yandex makes money the moment someone clicks on your ad (that's why it's called pay-per-click advertising).

That is, the very fact of displaying your ad when a user enters a particular request does not bring any money to Yandex. Therefore, he is interested in having your ad clicked on as often as possible. This contextual advertising even has such an indicator as CTR (click-to-rate) - the ratio of the number of impressions of your ad to the number of clicks on this ad.

The higher your CTR, the more Yandex loves you - it doesn’t have to waste your ads. It is believed that Yandex has a regular auction system for displaying ads - whoever sets the price per click higher will display it higher and more often. But in reality, everything depends not on the cost per click, but on the CTR. Let's talk about specific numbers.

Example in numbers - how Direct works

Let's say your competitor has a price of 10 rubles per click, and his CTR is 1% (for every 100 impressions, his ad is clicked only 1 time). Therefore, for every hundred impressions of this ad, Yandex earns 10 rubles.

Your situation is different. You set a cost per click of only 5 rubles. But at the same time, the CTR of your ad is 10% (for every 100 impressions, your ad is clicked on 10 times). And in your case, Yandex already earns 50 rubles from the same hundred ad impressions.

Which ad do you think Yandex will show more often and higher? Of course, yours, because 50 rubles of earnings is more than 10 rubles of earnings. And he has to do the same job - show the ad exactly one hundred times on the search results page.

Conclusion - we need to strive to ensure that the CTR of our ads is higher than that of our competitors. And the main thing that affects the CTR is relevance your ad to the query entered by the user in the search bar.

If a user enters “buy a sports bike” and an ad with the heading “Buy bicycles” is displayed, then this is one level of relevance. And if, for the same request, an ad with the heading “Buy a sports bike” is displayed, then this is a completely different level of uniqueness, wouldn’t you agree?

That is, we need to make sure that all our ads are as close as possible to what people are looking for. This, in fact, is called relevance.

In this case, we need to literally use the same words that the user uses to search (and preferably in the same order). That's how it works human brain- if he is looking for “Olympic sports suits”, then he will respond much more readily to the heading “Olympic sports suits” than to “Olympic sports suits”. Although in essence it is the same thing.

And all because human attention is very scattered when working with the Internet. We grasp information only with a piece of our subconscious, with peripheral vision. We have certain words in our heads with which we formulated the request - and it is these words that we long to see.

Thus, we need to ensure that for every possible request and request formulation we display an ad with the corresponding words, with the same formulations.

By the way, this is why it is considered in good form create advertising campaigns in Yandex Direct for 2000 - 3000 key queries. We need to cover maximum quantity possible wordings, and make your own unique ad for each wording.

A few words about “professionals”

Often entrepreneurs believe that ordinary mortals will never be able to cope with this task. So they hire “professionals” and hope that they will do all the work simply because you paid them money (and sometimes quite a lot of money).

Unfortunately, no one can spoil your advertising campaign like professionals. There is a reason why they will never give you the result you need. I will not dwell on this in detail here.

The main thing you must understand is that you can do this work yourself. Moreover, you will make it much better, and completely free. If you learn this, then at least you will be able to strictly control the directologists, who generally disband as soon as they sense the incompetence of the customer.

And now let’s actually figure out how to create an advertising campaign in contextual advertising for a couple of thousand key queries in one evening.

How to select 2000 key queries in one evening

Of course, we will not do this manually. There is a very good and free tool called Slovoeb (no joke, that’s what it’s called). This is exactly what will allow you to quickly select many key queries.

At its core, it is a parser program. That is, it parses the Yandex service, which is called Wordstat. You, of course, can manually select queries through the same Wordstat, but this will take you several months.

Before starting work, we need to download this very SlovoBOY (let’s call it that here) from this link. And it is important to configure it correctly. The speed of the program will depend on the settings. I will write in more detail later in a separate article.

Next, you need to create a list of the main keywords in your niche. If you sell glasses, then these will be: “buy glasses”, “order glasses”, “glasses of this brand”, “glasses price” and others. These are the largest keywords that people use to search for your product.

Next, you paste this entire list into SlovoBOY and start parsing it. That is, the program automatically accesses the Wordstat service and collects smaller key queries based on those you specified.

If necessary, specify a region so that the program collects keys only for your city or region.

Depending on the niche, SlovoBoy can collect up to 2000 queries for each major keyword you added. And after that, the most important part of the work begins - weeding out unnecessary keys.

Keyword filtering

Even at the stage of collecting keywords, you can immediately specify “negative words” in the search settings in SlovoBoe. This means that the program will immediately exclude those keys that contain certain words that do not suit you.

For example, you are not involved in sales at all sunglasses. Then put “sun protection” in the list of negative keywords.

But still, this will not save you from manual filtering of the collected key queries. You can do this directly in the program interface, or first export the list of words to Excel (whichever is more convenient for you).

Next, you need to go through the entire list and remove those key queries that definitely will not bring you any clients. With the same glasses, it can be “buy glasses case”, or “order children’s glasses”, or “WoW bloody troll glasses price”.

Here you need to concentrate as much as possible and try not to miss anything (although you will still miss something). Therefore, it is better to do this work in the morning, when you are fresh and alert.

And in two to three hours you will have a ready-made list of clean keywords with which you can continue to do your contextual advertising.

Composing advertisements

For your PPC search ad to be successful, it must meet three requirements:

1. Keyword in title. There must be a direct occurrence of the key in the title. Yandex even once provided statistics on how much this increases the click-through rate of an ad. It turned out that it was a lot. Don't forget that the keyword is highlighted in bold, and this also attracts the user's attention.
2. Keyword in the body of the ad. The same principle applies here - bold and 100% relevance of your ad to the user’s request.
3. Call to action in the body of the ad. We need a person to click on the ad. That’s why we write like this: click, look here, read more, click, and so on. The main thing is not to write something like “Order” as a call to action. He can’t order anything yet—he has to click first. Therefore this is a bad call-to-action.

Here it is important for you to understand that you should have exactly as many ads as you have found key queries. If there are 2000 keywords, then you should have 2000 ads. One for each individual keyword.

This is the only way we will achieve 100% relevance of ads to queries, which means a higher CTR, and therefore a lower cost per click than our competitors (even if we appear higher than them and receive more clicks than them).

I understand that manually creating 2,000 unique ads is very difficult. Therefore, I have prepared a special tool for you - an excel file that will make you at least ten thousand advertisements in just a few clicks of the mouse.

You receive this tool, as well as instructions on how to use it, as a bonus to my video course. I highly recommend it.

By the way, here is one video lesson from the course. In it, I show you how to correctly compose advertisements for Direct, and how to use this magical program.

Video - how to make 2000 unique ads in a couple of minutes

Conclusion

Of course, this is not the end of setting up contextual advertising. We will need to upload advertisements via direct message, set bids, connect an automatic bid adjustment program, learn how to do end-to-end analytics, and much more.

But I hope you have understood the main points, and this is enough to make contextual advertising yourself. I would be grateful for your comments.

Don't forget to download my book. There I show you the fastest way from zero to the first million on the Internet (extract from personal experience in 10 years =)

We released new book"Content marketing in social networks: How to get into your subscribers’ heads and make them fall in love with your brand.”

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.

At that time, he did not know about the existence of the Internet, much less about contextual advertising on it. Therefore, he quickly got tired of promoting his product on his own, and with entrepreneurial activity it was over.

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

Today we will talk about how to create attractive contextual advertising, in simple words We'll explain how to create ads, set up everything that can be set up, 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.