In one of my previous posts I wrote about Google gaining market share in Russia by aggressively promoting it’s non-search products, such as Android and Chrome, for example.

Browsers with built-in default search engine are generally a popular way to get extra searches. Yandex teamed up with Firefox, while Google runs TV commercials for Chrome.

It seems like Google’s marketing efforts are paying off. According to several independent analyst companies Chrome became the most used browser in Russia in December 2011, surpassing Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

Social networking is huge in Russia. Already back in 2009 Russians were pronounced the most engaged social networking audience in the world. The latest statistics, according to rocID.ru (in Russian), say that 82% of all Internet users in Russia (which is by the way 70 million people) have an account in at least one social network. In 2010 only 52% of Internet users were socially engaged, so the increase is quite significant, as you can see.

The most “popular” Russian social network, according to rocID, is Odnoklassniki.ru, with 73% of all Russian Internet users being registered there, followed by vKontakte (62%), MoiMir @ Mail.ru (31%) and Facebook (18%).

Interestingly, only 5% of Internet users had Facebook accounts in 2010, according to last year’s research.

Advertising opportunities in Russian social networks

I am sure most of us played with Facebook advertising to some extent (and probably different degree of success). Despite the strong growth throughout last year, Facebook advertising in Russia will probably not give the reach you are hoping for. There are however other options.

Odnoklassniki ads

Being the largest Russian social network, Odnoklassniki is the least flexible when it comes to advertising possibilities. They only offer banner advertising, charging CPM of 70 Russian rubles (2,3 USD or 1,75 EUR). Available targeting options are gender, age and location.

Text ads on Odnoklassniki are powered by Yandex.Direct and Begun, on CPC basis, but without social targeting.

vKontakte ads

Being a Facebook clone, vKontakte also has a similar advertising platform. The ads look somewhat similar to Facebook’s and can be targeted by:

- Gender, age, relationship status, country and city, street, metro stations etc.

- University, school and a year of graduation

- Interests and topics

Pricing models are CPC or CPM (again, just like on Facebook).

Like everything else in Russia, vKontakte advertising is not so easy to set up for non-Russian residents. They suggest to contact their sales department for more information.

MoiMir ads

MoiMir PPC advertising platform is relatively new. It was created in spring 2011. Just like Odnoklassniki advertising, Moi Mir ads are powered by Mail.ru and only available on CPM basis.

MoiMir ads offer not only banners, but also sponsored videos and video pre-rolls.

Microblogging is a hot topic in Russian press. Only recently I wrote that Yandex indexed 1.68 million Russian Twitter accounts and that Mail.ru created their own microblogging service Futubra. Last week Ria.ru reported (in Russian) from Paris, that French Semiocast counted 5 million Twitter accounts that belong to Russians.

According to Semiocast research, Russia is 20th country in the world in terms of registered Twitter accounts. The leader is, of course, US with 107,7 million accounts, followed by Brazil (33,3 million accounts), Japan (29,9 million), UK (23,8 million) and Indonesia (19,5 million).

As Yandex noted before, Russians are not exactly active Twitter users. Semiocast reported that only 27% of Russians logged in and wrote at least one tweet during the period from September 1, 2011 till November 30, 2011. This percentage, as low as it seems, is the same as, for example, in the UK.

Another Western social network, Google+, seems to be doing pretty well in Russia too, according to PlusDemographics.com anyway. The resource reports that the number of Russian Google+ users is close to 1,4 million. The majority of people using Google+ in Russia are male (75%); over 80% of the user base are 18-34 years old.

Not surprisingly, a significant number of Google+ users are employed by tech companies, such as Yandex, Google itself, Intel and Microsoft.

One of my readers asked to explain how Yandex Direct works with geotargeting. Yandex’s PPC solution is not at all as straightforward and user-friendly as Google’s AdWords and can be pretty confusing in the beginning. Once you get used to it though, it is actually quite a good product.

AdWords provides many more options when it comes to campaign settings, including geotargeting possibilities. I will, however, try to make some parallels between the two PPC platforms.

1. How Yandex Direct geotargeting works

To understand how Yandex Direct geotargeting works, it is very important to remember what the PPC campaign structure looks like. Yandex does not support ad groups, so a Direct campaign would be typically structured as follows:

In Yandex Direct geotargeting settings are available on both campaign and ad level, while in AdWords – only on campaign level.

Location-wise, you can target almost any place in the world with your Yandex Direct PPC campaigns. Africa can be only targeted as a whole continent. In Europe, Asia, Americas and Oceania geotargeting is possible on a country level, however not all countries can be included. Middle East and Baltic states are also available as regions.

In CIS (former Soviet Union republics, excluding Russia) geotargeting can be done on a country, region and city level. Country-level targeting is available for all CIS countries; in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine it is possible to target districts inside the countries. City-level geotargeting is available only in Kazakhstan and Ukraine.

In Russia geotargeting can be done on a country, region, district and city level.

2. How to configure geotargeting for Yandex PPC campaigns

First of all, geotargeting can be only configured in the web interface. Although Yandex recently released a desktop application for managing Direct campaigns, it is very basic and does not allow modifying campaigns settings.

When creating a campaign or an ad via Yandex Direct web interface, after specifying keywords, negative keywords and Yandex Catalog categories, Yandex will ask to “select display regions”. That is where you will find all the places you can target with your ads. Just tick the boxes with countries/ regions/ cities you are interested in, and with that it’s all done!

If you need to change geotargeting settings for a campaign, go to the campaign management page. Change Settings option will be in the menu on the left-hand side.

To change geotargeting settings for an ad, click “Edit ad” and adjust the targeting in “Select display regions” field.

Geotargeting in Yandex.Direct  vs. Google AdWords

Generally, as shown in the table below, Google offers more precise geotargeting possibilities than Yandex. When it comes to Russia, however, Google only offers to target regions inside the country, while Yandex allows targeting on a city level.

Google also offers something called “search intent targeting”, which essentially means that if I am searching for “designer handbags UK” sitting in Stockholm, I will be shown ads that target UK-based audience. Yandex does not have similar feature as such, but the machine learning technology MatrixNet that powers both organic and paid results does similar job, without us knowing it.

Yesterday morning Russian Internet press reported that Yandex and Skype signed an agreement and will begin promoting each others’ services in Russia.

Skype will offer everyone who downloads their PC client to install a browser extension Yandex Bar. Yandex Bar, in exchange, will display Skype account balance and provide an easy way to top up Skype account via Yandex Money. This looks like a good way for Yandex to attract more users and possibly regain the market share that they lost to Google last year. In 2011 Skype showed 40% increase in Russian user base ending the year with 22,4 million registered accounts.

So what does Skype get in return? From what I read today it is very unclear: Skype will be promoted on Yandex sites and properties (which is of course a lot of traffic), but it is not specified how.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Yandex displaying links to companies’ profiles on different social media sites in snippets:

These links are pretty good to have for promoting social profiles as well as for improving CTR from the SERP (which is a very important Yandex ranking factor!). Russian SEO community very quickly figured that in order to get social links in snippets one would need to place them on the homepage. Yesterday Yandex published an official guide (in Russian) on how to do it.

Basically, there are 2 ways:

1. Placing links to social profiles on website’s homepage.

2. Linking social profiles from a company profile in Yandex Spravochnik (something similar to Google Places). The easiest way to do it is by adding the company to Yandex Spravochnik via Yandex Webmaster, and then editing the social links from Yandex Webmaster interface.

The supported social networks for this feature are vKontakte, Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter and YouTube.

To qualify for social links in snippets you will need to link to at least 2 social profiles.

Quite often I get a question what TLD is preferable for the Russian market – .RU or .РФ, to which I always reply dot RU, of course. РФ domains, despite a good take off, when they were introduced back in 2010, never managed to become a good alternative to .RU. A lot of individuals and companies purchased domains when they become available, but very few made good use of them.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, there are very few actual sites on .РФ domains as they did not prove to be useful neither for Yandex SEO nor for businesses. According to statdom.ru (which is the absolute best resource for any kind of information about Russian domain names, by the way), only around 30% of all .RF domains are used for actual sites, and the rest are parked, redirected or return an error.

What’s interesting is that when it comes to .RU domains, 56% of them are in use and only 9,4% are parked. The numbers speak for themselves.

Another interesting fact is that a lot of owners skip renewing their .РФ. On January 1st there were 938 121, but on January 15 the number shrank to 911 922. This means that about 27 000 .РФ domains got canceled in the first 2 weeks of 2012! The cancellation rate had been increasing throughout last year, and according to some analysts (in Russian), if it continues this way, the number of registered .RF domains will shrink by 250 000 by the end of March.

During 2011 Yandex lost 4% of searches in Russia to Google.ru, reports Vedomosti (in Russian). I heard mentions of this fact throughout last year, but here is how it looks in absolute numbers.

According to LiveInternet statistics, in December last year search market in Russia was divided between Yandex, Google.ru and other smaller search engines as shown below:

In December 2010 Yandex held 64,1% of the search market, and Google – 21,5%. Quite a big change in one year, isn’t it?

Analysts say that Google’s market share most likely increases not due to the search engine traffic itself, but because of other platform Google owns or has partnerships with. Presumably, the majority of growth  can be explained by wide use of Android devices (where search is powered by Google), social network Google+ as well as popularity of Chrome browser, which Google has been advertising on TV in Russia since half a year!

I have to mention, however, than Yandex also works with various partners and web browsers. Facebook search in Russia is, for example, powered by Yandex. Same goes for Windows Phone 7 and Firefox, among others. Needless to say that Aport and Rambler use Yandex’s search engine, and that Bing’s ads in Russia are in reality Yandex Direct.

Just like I predicted earlier, Yandex now announced a strong focus on mobile technologies in 2012, and not only on advertising. They acquired a mobile development company SPB Software, and, I suspect, is going to work on a response to Android – their own mobile OS.

A spokesman of Yandex told Vedomosti that the company expects 58-60% growth in revenue in 2012 and not focusing on increasing their market share, but rather creating new and useful products. The next big release, for example, is supposed to be a new search platform, which better understands interests and preferences of Internet users (read: personalized search).

Yesterday I read something, as I thought at first, totally ridiculous, but it seems to be happening for real. In Belarus from today it is forbidden to provide any kind of services or sell any kind of goods on the Internet from a website with any other top level domain than .BY.

Cnews.ru reports that according to the new law companies and individuals will be administratively punished for doing business with foreign sites. Even Internet cafes providing access to forbidden sites will be forced to pay fines. The fine for violating this law will be up to 30 “units”, which is currently 1,05 million Belarusian rubles, which is approximately 120 USD.

Interestingly, Belarusian citizens will not be charged for accessing foreign websites. I guess the government believes that the people of Belarus will abide the law and stop using beloved vkontakte.ru, Twitter and Facebook right away? What about watching YouTube videos? Nope! Send an email from @mil.ru? Nope! Seriously, how is this possible in 21st century?!

Belarusian Internet in numbers

Belarus is not a big country. It’s population is only 9 million people (compare with the Ukraine – 46 mln, Russia – 142 mln). Belarusian Internet (so-called ByNet) can be described with the number*s below:

3 500 000: Internet users

43 000: registered .BY domains (on 28.12.2011)

Up to 94%: percentage of traffic, generated by Belarusian users, routed to Russian web resources

$6 100 000: value of Belarusian online advertising market in 2010

18 000: registered Twitter accounts belong to users from Belarus

80 000: Belarusian blogs in LiveJournal

18,3%: of Belarusian population have access to broadband Internet

150-200 000 000: cases of law violation will have to be registered daily, because this is how much traffic is routed from Belarus to foreign websites every day.

Combining this with very low buying ability, is the market attractive enough to even bother creating Twitter.by or LiveJournal.by? Or will Belarusians be limited to browsing their 43 000 .by domains?

So what happens now?

The purpose of the law if, I suppose, is to attract more money into the country. Instead of buying products from abroad, Belarusians are now supposed to buy from the same Russian or European companies, but only those with physical offices inside the country. By this, money stays in the country -> Good for the economy. Will it work? I am not an economist and I won’t judge.

The officials of Belarus, after massive press pick up of these news, clarified: they do not restrict access to foreign resources for Belarusian citizens. Nether they forbid the citizens sell their goods and services on foreign resources. The restrictions apply to businesses operating on Belarusian territory via foreign sites. And that means what? Will an affiliate selling leads to Amazon.com be punished? Will ISP selling Internet access to this affiliate be punished?

These news gave me a strange feeling. We used to be one country, and now, at the same time as Russia becomes the largest Internet market in Europe and takes pride for it, this kind of laws emerge in Belarus. Of course, the access is not restricted for citizens, but where is a guarantee that mail.ru and Odnoklassniki, Facebook and Twitter won’t pull out from the country?

* Data sources for statistics: InterFax Belarus, MobWiki.ru

Russian Internet is developing astonishingly fast! 2011 was a great year full of important events and big changes. Russia became the fastest growing online advertising market in Europe. But even the key players, like Yandex, underestimated the tempo Russian Internet usage grew in 2011!

In his latest presentation at SES San-Francisco (August 2011) Preston Carey, Yandex Business Developer in the US & Europe, presented a forecast that suggested that Russian Internet audience will reach 80 million users by 2014:

Now, it appears, the number of Internet users in Russia reached 70 million already by the end of last year, according to the Russian Ministry of Communications.

This makes Russia the largest online market in Europe leaving the former leader, Germany, behind with its 66 million Internet users.

The Ministry of Communications is very optimistic about this development. They expect the number of Internet users in Russia to reach 90 million by 2014.