IAB Europe reported that expenditures on online advertizing in Europe in 2010 grew by 15,4% (from 15,3 billion Euro in 2009 to 17,7 billion Euro in 2010). The largest contributors to this grows became developing Eastern and Central European economies. Russia tops the ranking with incredible 37% increase in Internet advertizing spend, followed by Turkey, Romania and Slovenia:

The biggest market for online advertizing is the United Kingdom with total yearly spend of 4,77 billion Euro, followed by Germany (3,63 billion) and France (1,88 billion). Russia is still far behind, but is catching up quickly.

Russian Online Advertizing Market in numbers (2010):

- 687 billion Euro in expenditures

- 7th largest internet advertizing market in Europe

- 11,8% of all advertizing budgets are spent online

- 236 billion Euro was spent on Display/ banner advertizing

- 354 billion Euro was spent on contextual / search advertizing

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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In the last couple of months I have been spending a good amount of time with Russian PPC campaigns, both in Google.ru and Yandex. Even though I personally prefer Google’s interface, as it much more user -friendly and convenient, Yandex delivers more traffic and at a good cost.

Yandex.Direct provides some interesting features that automate parts of optimization tasks, such as, for example, “Autobroker” for automatic CPC management and “Autofocus” for automatic keyword refinement. Unlike most Google’s PPC automation tools, these two are actually quite useful.

The recent study conducted by Neiron.ru also showed that Yandex PPC ads have significantly better CTR comparing to Russian AdWords :

Yandex

Google.ru

To come up with these numbers Neiron.ru analyzed 5 896 473 search result pages in Yandex and 2 199 835 in Google.ru.

According to the study, ads in premium (top 3) positions receive 75,7% of all clicks on PPC ads in Yandex and 91,1% in Google.ru. 9 ads in Yandex’s right column get to share the remaining 24,3%. Google’s 8 ads on the right receive 8,9% of clicks.

Last week Yandex announced that machine learning technology MatrixNet, powering their organic search, was applied to Yandex.Direct as well.

CTR of Yandex.Direct ads increased by astonishing 20% during the first week after implementation of MatrixNet. Quite an improvement, isn’t it?

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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As we all know, both Google and Bing are using social signals such as tweets, Facebook shares, Google+ shares etc., as a component of their ranking formula. But very little, if anything, has been said about Yandex so far.

Preston Carey actually received this question at SMX London earlier this year and came back with a very vague explanation of a kind “kind of sort of but not really”.

Also, as we know, for the last year Yandex has been busy with tweaking their new algorithm based on machine learning and trying to understand what their users want based on their search behavior. Nothing is pointing towards social signals being important for Yandex SEO, but I believe social will play a bigger role in the future, and here is why:

1. Yandex keeps a close eye on Twitter in Russia

A year ago I wrote about the report on Twitter usage in Russia, which Yandex posted on their corporate blog. This year Yandex created a follow up and published updated stats with some nice infographics. The article, unfortunately, is only in Russian, but here are the main takeaways:

• there is over 1 million Twitter accounts in Russian
• there are 370 thousand tweets written in Russian daily; 85 of them are retweets, around 30% – replies to other tweets
• during the day there are only 64 thousand active users writing updates on Twitter (6,4% of all Russian accounts)
• there are less active accounts than in 2010, but they tweet more

2. Yandex offered a possibility to sign in into any of its services with accounts in any major social networks and sites

Russians are the most socially engaged nation in the world, and social networks own a lot of personal data about Internet users. Since all major Russian social networks provide advertising platforms with powerful targeting possibilities, Yandex has to compete with them for users and for adertising budgets.

Just like Facebook in the west, Russian vKontakte (recently rebranded to vk.com), MoiMor@mail.ru and Odoklassniki.ru own huge amounts of personal information, which is probably more reliable that “user intent” calculated by Yandex’s machine learning technology. I believe Yandex will have to look at social in order to stay competitive and keep the money flowing into Yandex.Direct (which is their biggest revenue source).

3. Yandex developed it’s own “Share” widget

Not many people know, but Yandex has its own widget for sharing infortmation in social networks: http://api.yandex.ru/share/. Obviously all the information about shares is recorded by Yandex.

4. Recently launched product “Yandex app search” incorporates social signals

Although missed by many press-release-rewrites, Yandex based their ranking algorithm for mobile apps not only on rankings in AppStore/ Android Market, but also on mentions in social networks.

The clients I’ve been working for were not active in social media, so I have no personal experience with this. Russian SEO society, known for being very creative when it comes to cheating search engine algorithms, recognizes that tweets (especially tweets from authority accounts) help to speed up crawling by both Google and Yandex. I have not come across any records of tweets, or any social media shares, helping to better rank in Yandex.

So are social signals important for Yandex SEO? Probably not that much at the moment. Will they be? I’d bet!

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Just a few hours ago Yandex announced that next week they will launch yet another version of their search algorithm! This time the change is aiming at eliminating “over-optimized” content, i.e. texts stuffed with keywords and almost unreadable for the end user due to that.

Yandex recommend the webmasters, who intentionally over-optimized their websites’ content in order to improve positions in the search results, to go through the texts and make them more reader-friendly.

Yandex also promise that penalized for “over-optimization” pages will come back to their old positions once the problem is fixed.

SearchEngines.ru in their coverage of the algorithm stated that already last week one could unusually big chnges in Yandex search results, which probably were related to the first roll-out stage:

* SERP updates for Yandex, as well as the other major search engines, can be monitored using Update Analyzer from Analyzethis.ru. Awesome and very useful tool, when working with SEO for Yandex, since, as I wrote in my earlier posts, Yandex is rolling out big updates on a regular basis.

I would like to remind you once again that Yandex is extremely good at understanding Russian language, its grammar and morphology. If you are using auto-translated or auto-generated content on your Russian version of the website (which is unfortunatelly quite common), you’ve got one week to re-write it in a good language

You can test the new algorithm in action on buki.yandex.ru – Yandex’s sandbox open for everyone’s use.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Yandex.Direct is a PPC platform for advertizing on Yandex and their content network. Yandex hold 65% of contextual ads market in Russia, so if you want to enter this market, that’s probably where you will allocate a big chunk of your advertizing budget.

Yandex.Direct ads in Yandex search results

Yandex have been working very hard for a year or so to attract foreign advertisers, not only promoting themselves at conferences in the US and Europe, but also investing into English translations of the most important tools and tutorials:

• Yandex.Direct interface in English: http://direct.yandex.com
• Yandex.Direct help center and program description in English:
  http://advertising.yandex.com/, http://direct.yandex.com/help/
• Yandex corporate blog: http://company.yandex.com/ with the latest news and features

When I first started with Yandex.Direct, there were a few things, which I had a hard time to grasp, being used to working with Adwords. Below I will list the key differences between Yandex.Direct and Google Adwords.

1. Campaign structure

Yandex.Direct platform allows you to group keywords and ads into campaigns. There is no support for ad groups. The campaigns looks like a bunch of ads with a number of keywords assigned to each ad.

2. Keyword match types

In Yandex.Direct there are no match types as such. The keyword matching works like modified broad match in Adword. E.g. adding a keyword Cheap Laptop Bags into Yandex.Direct will give you similar results to adding +cheap +laptop +bags into Google Adwords.

There is a tool inside Yandex Direct the system that allows you to broaden keyword matching and incorporate synonyms, which will make it more similar to Google’s broad match.

You can start your keyword research using Yandex Keyword Tool.

3. Negative keywords

Negative keywords can be only created at an Ad level.

4. Ads

The ad format is 33 characters for the title and 75 characters for the ad text. Dynamic keyword insertion is supported.

What is not supported is ad rotation. When working with Adwords, you usually create several ads per ad group and test different messages to maximize your CTR and conversion. With Yandex.Direct it is impossible to have several ads shown for the same keyword at the same time.

5. Display network

Yandex have an extensive content network in Russia. The selection criteria for the websites are very strict, therefore you can be sure, when opting into the network, that your ads will be shown only on respectable and good quality sites with a fair amount of traffic. This is a big advantage in comparison with Google’s GDN, where you get all those useless clicks from thousands small spammy sites!

What is different with Yandex content network is that :

- the ads will only be shown if your keywords match keywords in web page content (like with Bing content ads, really), while Google would rather match a “theme” of your ad group than a particular keyword.

- It is not possible to create a campaign targeting display ads only, which is totally the opposite of what Google recommend when working with GDN. Your ads to be shown on Yandex content network AND search results, or in Yandex search results only.

6. Conversion tracking

In Yandex.Direct there is no conversion tracking as we know it. Instead of tracking pixel you get from Google or Bing, the suggest you to install Yandex.Metrics, which is their analytics kit, in a way similar to Google Analytics. Yandex Metrics is a very good and powerful tool; the only problem with it is that it is only available in Russian at the moment.

Otherwise, you can rely on 3rd party tracking solution, but then the number of conversion won’t be shown in Yandex.Direct interface.

7. Mobile ads

Yandex.Direct does not support device targeting. Your ads will be shown on mobile devices by default if they occupy position #1 or #2.

The interface of Yandex.Direct otherwise if pretty straightforward. If you are an experienced search marketer, it won’t take you long to get comfortable with the platform.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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For almost a year now Yandex is using machine learning technology aka Matrixnet. Until recently, the “learnings” were used for improving the SERPs: eliminating spam, understanding users’ intents in cases when search queries are too generic or have multiple possible meanings etc. etc. Opinions differ, but all in all the quality of search results is much better than when I started writing RussianSearchTips.

A week ago Yandex launched yet another search algorithm Reykjavík. They call it their first step towards personalized search. Reykjavík aims to adapt to users’ language preferences, i.e. shows more results in English to those who likes (and clicks on) results in English and the other way around.

Last week yet another human aspect was brought to the world’s attention: behavioral targeting for display advertising. Sounds good, right? But here comes the weird part.. or rather parts

a) “Behavioral targeting” includes dividing the audiences into 2 groups by gender, 5 groups by age and 2 groups by income.. Hmm, not that is interesting. The new technology called Crypta, which is behind this targeting, analyses search queries of Internet users and by looking on what people are searching for, it assigns them to these categories. But income, medium or high, still? C’mon!

b) Yandex is positioning this “smart” targeting as a “Super-premium” service and is charging 1,5 times more for using it, comparing to traditional targeting options. This comes as a surprise to me, since testing these things with both Bing and Google, from my experience, gave nothing. Yandex, however, prior to releasing this targeting, published a number or research papers of how and what different gender and age group search, so now, supported by all those stats, this “smart” targeting can actually sell..perhaps.

Now, a few other things I find amusing. Mail.ru, owning 2 major social networks in Russia (Odnoklassniki.ru and MoiKrug.ru) commented to CNews.ru that “when the (market) players do not possess actual information about their users, they are forced to replace it by hypothetical assumptions based on statistical algorithms. Not sure, Yandex’s approach can be a sufficient replacement for real knowledge about their audience”. WOW, I thought. That is mean.

But guess what, the day before yesterday Yandex released another new feature! Now you can sign in into ANY Yandex service with your account in several social media sites , namely Vkontakte, Odnoklassniks, Facebook, Google, Mail.Ru or Twitter! This feature is available on all devices. Ha-ha, and how is that for “not possessing real data”? Working on it, working on it

I am not sure, when or if antitrust and privacy law suits will hit Yandex, but these developments are really fun to watch! Looking forward to further developments

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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