Recently I hear a lot of rumors about Twitter and Facebook slowing down their growth tempo and their audiences getting smaller. Last week GlobalWebIndex revealed some interesting data that actually shows the opposite: apparently Facebook and Twitter are still the fastest growing social networks in the world. What is also interesting, vKontakte and Odnoklassniki are in that list as well:

Back to Twitter. Twitter has been growing in Russia during the last 2 years. The amount of Twitter users in Russia varies depending on a source. According to Semiocast, the microblogging service had 5 million Russian-based users in the beginning of 2012; Yandex shows 7,18 million indexed Russian Twitter accounts today.

GlobalWebIndex says that the amount of active Twitter users in Russia increased by more than 60% during the last half of 2012. Can it be right?

As for Facebook, in the market totally dominated by vKontakte and Odnoklassniki, it apparently managed to grow by 33% from Q2 to Q4 of 2012.

Reliable or not, these numbers still are a good indication of how engaged the Russian Internet audience is in social networking. People spend a lot of time browsing social content, and these stats prove once again that VK, Odnoklassniki and even Facebook should be a vital element of any company online strategy.

I found this speech of Ilya Segalovich (CTO of Yandex) at DLD in Munich very interesting and inspirational. For those interested in Yandex as a company, take some time and watch it!

For a while I’ve been wondering, and I guess some of you did too, if there is a good competitive intelligence tool for Yandex? Recently I found one, which works well, and I would like to share my findings with you. The tool is called SpyWords.

I used it a lot in the last couple of month, and since it did a good job and saved a lot of time for me, I thought I give them a credit and review them on my blog.

Features

To start with, SpyWords is very similar (but simpler) to SEMRush, which is a well-known competitive intelligence tool for Google and Bing.

Basically, SpyWords has three main features that can be used for various purposes. The interface is very straightforward, and although the tool does not have as many reporting options as SEMRush, it can provide useful insights into verticals, SEO and SEM competitors, and be a great help in researching keywords.

Competitive intelligence for Yandex and Google

This feature gives an overview of a specific competitor in Yandex (paid and organic) or Google (paid and organic) as well as competitiveness of a specific keyword in Yandex and Google.

Entering keyword in the search field will give you the following information:

PPC (Yandex Direct & Google AdWords)

- Number of impressions for the keyword in Yandex and Google

- Average CPC for the keyword in Yandex and Google

- Number of advertisers bidding on the keyword in Yandex and Google

- Names of the competitors bidding on the keywords and their text ads

- Other relevant keywords that are purchased on Yandex and Google together with the keyword, their search volumes, competitiveness and average CPC

SEO (Yandex and Google)

- Top 50 domains competing for the keyword in organic search, their ranking URLs and snippets

- Total number of organic keywords each competitor ranks top 50

Analyzing one specific competitor is even more interesting. Entering a specific domain in the search field will provide you with the following insights:

PPC (Yandex Direct & Google AdWords)

- Number of keywords the competitor is buying in Yandex and Google AdWords

- Average position of competitor’s ads in Yandex Direct and Google AdWords

- Approximate daily budget in Yandex Direct and Google AdWords

- Approximate daily traffic from Yandex Direct and Google AdWords

- Keywords purchased by the competitor on Yandex and Google, ad texts, average positions, monthly impressions, competitiveness and average CPC

- All competitor’s ads in Yandex Direct and AdWords, landing page URLs and number of keywords assigned to each ad (especially relevant for Yandex direct)

- Main competitors of the analyzed domain in paid search

SEO (Yandex and Google)

- All keywords the competitor ranks for in Google and Yandex, position for each keyword, average monthly impressions, ranking URLs and snippets

- Main competitors of the analyzed domain in organic search (based on the amount of common keywords they rank for)

Domain comparison

This feature compares organic and paid search for up to 3 domains. Let’s say, for instance, we are working for Hotels.com, and trying to evaluate our competitor booking.com. Entering both domains into the search fields gives a snapshot comparison table that displays the following metrics for both domains:

- Numbers of keywords in paid search

- Average position in paid search

- Number of keywords in organic search

- Approximate daily SEM budget

- Number of paid visits per day

- Number of organic visits per day

The amount of keywords on paid and organic search can be also visualized as diagrams:

You can find out they keywords hotels.com and booking.com have / don’t have in common by clicking on the corresponding part of the diagram.

Keyword research

The last tab, the keyword tool, is mainly good for expanding ad groups and finding PPC keyword ideas with lower competition or lower CPC. Entering a keyword into the search box in the keyword tool tab will give the following information:

- Keyword suggestions

- Search volumes in Yandex and Google

- CPC for each keyword suggestions in Yandex and Google

- Numbers of competitors for each keyword suggestion in Yandex and Google

Based on the input from this tab, it is very easy to optimize the cost of PPC campaigns on AdWords and Yandex.Direct or simply find some gems to add to your keyword portfolio:

Overall, I really love SpyWords. Even though it does not have that many fancy features and reporting options, in most cases it provides you with sufficient information for making decisions. There are, of course, some highlights and lowlights, like with any tool.

Pros

- Price. The service only costs 1000 RUB (approx. 33 USD) per month.

- Very simple and intuitive interface.

- Quite reliable data.

- Saves a lot of time when analyzing verticals, competitors, or looking for keyword ideas.

Cons

- Interface is only in Russian.

- Difficult to purchase the tool from outside CIS due to limited payment options.

- When trying to open export files, the Cyrillic texts sometimes appears scrambled due to encoding issues.

Bonus tips

1. If you do not have any of the Russian e-currencies accounts or a credit card issued in CIS or any of these random countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Macedonia, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Philippines, or Montenegro, the most straightforward way to pay to purchase the tool is Yandex.Money. This payment system allows opening accounts from any part of the world.

2. If the content appears scrambled when opening the .csv export files, upload it to Google Drive and open it as a Google spreadsheet. Google is able to interpret Cyrillic symbols correctly.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with SpyWords in any way. I think the service is great and helpful for Russian SEO work, hence this post.

ComScore recently released an interesting report on Russian social networks and their audiences, which, I thought, could be interesting for everyone buying advertising in VK (vKontakte), Odnoklassniki or on Russian Facebook.

* The numbers are shown in million users

According to ComScore’s statistics, vKontakte is the largest social network in Russia, followed by Odnoklassniki.ru, and then Facebook.

What is more interesting, however, is the overlap between audiences of the social networks. Clearly, Facebook in Russia has very few loyal users; only 0,7 million people are satisfied with Facebook only. Audiences of VK and Odnoklassniki overlap quite a bit, but there is still significant amount of people, who only use one social network – 11,3 million of VK users did not visit Odnoklassniki in December, and 5,9 Odnoklassniki’s subscribers completely ignored vKontakte.

Both social networks commented on these numbers. PR manager of Odnoklassniki wrote on Twitter (in Russian) that they have most of the Russian users, and that all they are missing is “some million kids”. VK, generally known for a younger audience, made a similar (and quite sarcastic) comment saying that all they are missing is “some million pensioners”.

Last week I received this cute Christmas card from Yandex. I found it nice, and I wanted to share it will all of you.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, my dear friends! Or, as we say in Russia, Веселого рождества и Счастливого нового года! =)

The end of the year, and here we go again! Another big change in Yandex search algorithm. This was expected; Yandex tends to do big algorithm updates in the end of each year. Last year there were two big changes in Yandex search algorithm: in October, when ad-heavy pages were lowered in the search results, and in November, when the ranking formula for e-commerce sites was modified.

2012 brought yet another big, but not exactly unexpected change: with the new search algorithm “Kaliningrad” 70-80% of Yandex search results became personalized. Western SEOs used to working with Google are very much familiar with SERP personalization, but in the Russian SEO community this change steered a lot of discussions – from “SEO is dead” to “SEO is finally becoming more civilized”.

Time will tell how the new search algorithm will affect Russian SEO industry. For now, let’s have a look at what exactly has changed.

Known facts about Yandex personalized search

- 75-80% of SERPs are now personalized.

- According to Yandex, personalized search saves 14% of time spent by users looking for information.

- 30% of the time people are looking for websites they know from before.

- 10 searches and 20 clicks on search results is enough for Yandex to generate personalized SERPs for a user.

- Before the official roll out, the algorithm was tested on 50 000 000 users.

- CTR on on the first position of a personalized SERP is 37% better than on non-personalized one.

- There are 2 parts of “personalization”: search suggestions and search results.

Personalized search suggestions on Yandex

Yandex always paid a lot of attention to search suggestions. According to them, up to 50% of people click on the suggestions. Personalization of the search suggestions comes in 4 different shapes:

- The search terms that a user searched for earlier are shown on top of the list of search suggestions in purple (resembling clicked links). Yandex claims that 24% of all search queries are repeated, i.e. users already searched for them in the past.

- The websites that a user visits frequently and tends to click on in SERPs will be included into personalized search suggestions.

- Yandex classified all users into approximately 400 000 groups based on their interests. For each interest group the search suggestions are different.

- Yandex now displays more search suggestions related to other search queries within the same search session. According to Yandex, they show session-based suggestions on average 53 million times every day.

Personalized search results on Yandex

Personalization of search results concerns a lot of different aspects, such as user’s geo location, interests, and search behavior.

Localized search results have already been very prominent on Yandex, and so were the language preferences. Since August 2011 Yandex was following whether users liked or disliked to receive search results in English, and showed more results in English to those who liked them (read, clicked on them), and less to those who didn’t.

Now personalization also takes into account “liked” or “disliked” sites, meaning that a user, who frequently click on certain sites, will see them more often and higher up in the SERPs. The sites the user tends to ignore (not click on in the SERPs) will be shown to him / her less often and on lower positions.

Russian language is complex, and a lot of words can mean several different things. A while ago, Yandex started to give “dialog-like” suggestions refining such queries. For instance, a user searching for “кино” might mean a movie or a Russian rock bad called “кино”). Before Yandex would present the user with links saying, “кино слушать” (Kino listen) and “кино в рио” (Movies in Rio; where Rio is a cinema chain). Now Yandex thinks they can predict what a particular user is looking for and present the user with the search results with dominating music or movie listings.

What is interesting is that Yandex personalizes SERPs by default for all users, regardless if they are logged in or not. It is possible to disable personalization by logging in and changing account settings (which of course very few people will do).

According to Yandex representatives, in one third of the cases the top 5 search results for the same query are completely different.

What does this mean for Yandex SEO?

I believe that in this new environment the following 4 aspects of working with websites will become crucial:

- building a brand

- building authority

- improving user experience and usability

- working on improving behavioral factors

Strong brands will naturally benefit from this algorithm change: in the SERPs people tend to click more on known brands, stay there longer and even if some of the sites lack usability, people are more patient and stay longer, when they recognize and favor the brand. Hence, better rankings on Yandex.

Certain sites might see increase in traffic for generic key terms, where Yandex might show them higher than, for example, Wikipedia, to the users, who behave like they are in a shopping mode.

Intuitive interface and pleasant design of a website might positively influence the traffic due to better behavioral factors: more time spent on site, lower bounce rate.

The sites that solely relied on links in their SEO efforts, will most likely be the losers in the new personalized web.

General speaking, Yandex’s personalized search will not change the way most of Western SEOs work. Over the years I saw Yandex making a lot of big and little steps to showing webmaster that in order to succeed they have to think beyond paid links. Now, I believe, Yandex got SEOs to scratch their heads, which is a great thing! It is, of course, too early to judge, but I believe this change will make the RuNet a better place.

Yandex browser was launched on the 1st of October this year, and, despite it’s far from being a big player in the market, is gaining popularity among Russian users.

While still being far behind the most common browser in Russia Google Chrome, the grows curve of Yandex Browser usage looks pretty good.

Recently Yandex launched a Turkish version of the browser with integrated Yandex services, such as translator, anti-virus, and maps. Just like Google did in Russia, Yandex launched a TV advertizing campaign in Turkey to promote their browser. The main USP, as it looks, is the speed.

Yandex currently holds around 1% market share in Turkey, but plans to become the “second search engine” there, eventually taking control of 20% of the Turkish search market.

Historically, I always found difficult locating information about Russian mobile marketing and the mobile market itself. While in the West mobile has been a hot topic since a few years back, the information in Russia was scarce. Last week, however, I found a great fresh report with all sorts of juicy data about Russian mobile Internet, created by WapStart (the largest mobile ad networks in Russia and CIS) and OpenStat (a web analytics system).

The original report is in Russian, but I would like to provide a rather detailed summary of it here on RussianSearchTips, because this information is worth a fortune for anyone looking into mobile marketing in Russia.

Fact 1: The size of Russian mobile internet audience is 34,5 million

In my last posts about Russian mobile Internet (which was about a year ago!), I mentioned that, while lagging behind the West, Russian mobile Internet usage is growing at a rapid pace. The first two month of 2012 it grew by another 2,5%. It looks like by the end of 2012, the number of Russian mobile Internet increased by another 50%.

Fact 2: Apple, Nokia, and Samsung are the leading brands of mobile devices in Russia

While last year Nokia was holding the leading position in the Russian market, in 2012, just like in the rest of Europe, Nokia’s market share in Russia is falling like a brick. While Apple gained 9% market share in one year, Nokia list 21%.

Fact 3: iOS is the leading mobile operating system in Russia

While Android-based devices are taking the leading position in the world, in Russia iOS is a definite leader, according to WapStart:

Fact 4: Opera Mini is the most popular mobile browser in Russia

Opera is the leader of mobile browser market in Russia: different versions of Opera browsers (Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, Opera Tablet) make up for almost 50% of the market. Safari is the second biggest player (31%), followed by Android Browser (17%):

Fact 5: The majority of Russian Android devices run on Gingerbread (2.3) version

Despite being followed by 3 newer versions in the last 2 years, GingerBread is still the most common version of Android OS in Russia:

Fact 6: iOS 5.1.1 is the most common version on Apple devices in Russia

Apple users seem to update the OS on their devices more regularly (or perhaps buy new devices?). The latest iOS 5.1.1 was by far the most common version of the operating system at the time when the report was made. Now, with iOS 6 being released, this picture is probably different, however these stats say something about Apple holders’ behavior.

Fact 7: 40% of all visits from mobile devices are made in Moscow

The capital of Russia is also Russia’s economic hub. Just like with eCommerce, it is also the most developed region for mobile Internet usage. The second largest city Saint Petersburg is not even half of the size of Moscow when it comes to mobile traffic. The rest of Russia together delivers as much mobile traffic as Moscow region alone.

Fact 8: 99% of all mobile browsers used in Russia support cookies

Tracking is always somewhat of an issue when dealing with mobile sites and advertizing. Having a website fully optimized for mobile screens can open up great possibilities for advertizing and analyzing the data, since most of the mobile browsers used in Russia support cookies.

Fact 9: only 14% of all mobile browsers used in Russia support Flash

Just like in the rest of the world, Flash websites are not going to work in the mobile world in Russia. Very small percentage of mobile browsers support Flash.

Fact 10: the highest CTR for mobile ads in Russia is seen on Saturdays and Sundays

The peak of activity on weekends is nothing new to B2C marketers. This is the case in most markets, and Russia is not an exception. Mobile advertizing delivers more traffic on weekends, and the click-through rate increases by 6% – from average 0.2653% to 0.2808%.

Fact 11: Russian mobile audience is most active in the evenings

The graph below shows activity of mobile audience broken down by hour.

The blue bars indicate activity on weekends, the white bars – activity on weekdays.

According to WapStart data, click-through rate of mobile ads significantly increases in the evenings, both on weekdays and weekends.

Fact 12: Russian mobile ads targeting Apple devices have the highest CTR

Generally, the CTR of mobile ads in Russia is averaging between 0.2653% to 0.2808%, but owners of certain devices are more responsive to advertizing than others. Mobile ads targeted towards Apple devices (iPad, iPhone) have by far the highest CTR (0.46%), surprisingly, followed by Motorola and Blackberry (whose market shares, however, are insignificant comparing to the market leaders Apple, Nokia and Samsung).

Fact 13: Clicks from iPad are the most expensive

The most expensive device to target with mobile ads in Russia is Apple’s iPad. On average, a click from an iPad is worth 5.44 Russian Rubles (approximately 17 US Dollar cents / 13 Euro cents). iPhone-targeted traffic is the second most expensive with average CPC of 3.47 Russian Rubles (approximately 11 US Dollar cents / 9 Euro cents).

I believe it is obvious that Russia is catching up with the Western mobile craze: the mobile Internet usage is growing and the advertizing volumes are following the same trend. Although, being just a tiny part of the Russian Internet market today, mobile marketing has a promising future. The latest research by J’son & Partners Consulting predict that Russia’s mobile advertizing market will reach $60.8 m in value by the end of 2012, and grown up to $215.8 m by 2015. The question is, are you in the game?

Russian search market is living through exciting times. Google is pushing Yandex very hard, and Yandex is pushing back, not only by series of strategic partnerships (Google & Firefox, Yandex & Skype, Yandex & Windows Phone, Yandex & Apple’s iOS 6, you name it), but also by launching new competing products.

In the last 6 months Yandex created 3 new products directly competing with Google’s: Yandex Browser – a challenger to Google’s Chrome, Yandex.Store – an alternative to Google Play, Yandex.Disc – the Russian DropBox (or Google Drive).

Earlier this week the CEO of Yandex Arkady Volozh (on the left in the video below) explicitly told the audience at F.ounders conference in Dublin, that Yandex is also considering creating their own version of Android, or “Android ecosystem”, as he put it:

This move was sort of expected after Yandex acquired SPB software, a leading mobile development company in Russia.

The plan for creating the “ecosystem” includes partnerships with phone manufacturers and mobile providers. It is rumored that 4 partners has already taken off with the Yandex.Store, for example: one of the largest mobile operators in Russia Megafon is to build they own app store, where Yandex will be acting as a white label, and 3 local tablet manufacturers Pocketbook, TeXet and 3Q.

Read more (in English) on http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/10/23/yandex-lining-up-its-own-android-version/.

This evening I created these infographics about Russian Internet economy development in 2011-2012. The full report was presented by RAEC during Russian Internet Week 2012 – a 3 days long conference that covers all aspects of the Russian Internet Industry. Hope you like it!