In one of my resent posts I wrote about the test Yandex was running with Yandex.Direct layout placing ads to the bottom of the page instead of the right side of the SERP. The test proved to be successful, and the CTR for the ads positioned in the bottom of the page was 2,5 times higher than it used to be for the ads on the right hand side. Given the significant improvement in click through rates, Yandex rolled out the change to all Yandex.Direct ads.
While the new layout results in better performance, there are now fewer ad slots on the page – 3 for “premium” placement ads (on the top of the search results) and 4 for “guaranteed” placement ads (previously the top positions on the right, now – the ad slots under the search results). The so-called dynamic ad slots will be moved to the 2nd, 3rd and later SERPs, and therefore will get fewer impressions.
The new ad slot in the bottom of the page received the same design and features that the premium ad slot: same background color, favicons, and site links:
In 2011 Google did a similar change to AdWords layout, and the performance of the ads in the bottom was also better.
The change was generally well received by both advertisers and Yandex audience, and will definitely help companies to improve the quality of paid traffic from Yandex.
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.
Yandex keeps tweaking their advertising products and making them better. In the beginning of the year the company introduced 3 new features to make Yandex.Direct ads more effective.
1. Image ads for Yandex Advertising Network (YAN)
Being used to Google AdWords, I was always missing image ad formats in Yandex content network. Images are so much more appealing; they attract attention and give better impression about the product than boring text links.
Finally, last week Yandex introduced image ads for YAN. They are not exactly banners, but it is a huge improvement.
This week the new ads are being shown and tested on Yandex properties, and will spread over Yandex Advertising Network from 28th of March.
The images can be easily added via Yandex.Direct interface by uploading files from the Internet or computer. The format for the images is very flexible:
- GIF, PNG or JPG file types
- size from 150 to 5000X5000 pixel
- weight up to 10MB
The early adopters reported 60-400% increase in CTR, lower CPC and better ROI. However, the advertisers, who are not satisfied with the performance of image ads, can easily opt out and return to text link ads.
Favicons now are more important than ever. They have to be created with care, and the yellow background of Yandex ads should be taken into consideration.
3. Search ads in the bottom of the page
The “guaranteed” placements ad units (ads on the right side of search results) now can be also shown in the bottom of the page.
This feature has been rolled out for a small number of queries, but the the trials have shown that in a lot of cases moving guaranteed placements to the bottom of the SERP results into better CTR, more clicks and lower CPC.
Yandex shows up to 4 ads in this new placement, and like for ads in the premium placement, displays sitelinks.
All these new features allow advertisers to better utilize Yandex.Direct and get more traffic and leads from existing campaigns.
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.
Russian SEM spend in 2012 was valued at 1.4 billion US dollars, which is a 44% increase comparing to 2011, reported Russian bid management service eLama.
In 2012 Yandex remained the leader of contextual advertising market, followed by Google.ru and lastly Begun.
While the main players are still the same as in 2011, there are some major shifts: Begun lost significant part of the market, while both Yandex and Google gained market share.
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.
Sitelinks have been a widely-used practice in Google AdWords for a number of years. I think sitelinks are great; they take up more ad space on the SERP, make your ad more noticeable, tell more about your company or service and guide the visitors to specific products or categories you want to promote.
Recently Yandex also began offering a possibility to create sitelinks in Yandex.Direct. In this post I will explain how to do it.
About sitelinks in Yandex PPC
The product provided by Yandex is very similar to sitelinks in Google AdWords. The differences are minor:
1. Yandex sitelinks can only be displayed for the ad in the first position, while in Google sitelinks appear for ads in top 3 positions.
2. It is only possible to add 3 sitelinks to a Yandex ad, while Google can show up to 4.
3. Yandex sitelinks are displayed under the ad title in one line. In AdWords you see the sitelinks under the ad, and they can be arranged as a line or as two columns.
4. Yandex sitelinks are added on ad level, and not on campaign level, like in AdWords.
How to create sitelinks in Yandex.Direct interface
Configuring sitelinks is easily done through Yandex.Direct online interface. When creating or modifying an ad, just click the small “sitelinks” link under the URL field:
Then enter the link texts and corresponding URLs, and that’s all.
Alternatively, you can create the sitelinks in the desktop editor for Yandex PPC campaigns Direct.Commander. The tool is quite handy, however it is only available in Russian at the moment.
According to Yandex, using sitelinks can lift ad CTR by up to 40%. The average uplift in CTR for most advertisers is around 9%.
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.
One of my readers recently asked me how to estimate the budget needed for a PPC campaign on Yandex Direct. Google provides quite good tools for that to anyone who has a Google account, and so does Yandex, just in a slightly clumsier way.
How much my keyword costs on Yandex?
Right on the front page of Yandex Direct, in the top right corner, there are two not very prominent, but important items: Keyword Selection and Budget Forecast. That’s where you start gathering the information.
Keyword Selection in linked to Yandex’s keyword tool also known as Yandex Wordstat. The tool provides keyword ideas and monthly search volumes for specified country or region. Although the suggestions from Yandex Wordstat are integrated into Yandex Direct interface and can be accessed easily at the stage of creating ads, I still prefer compiling my keyword lists using this tool.
Budget forecast is linked to a tool that estimates number of impressions per month, average CPC, CTR and monthly budget for a keyword/ number of keywords in a specified country or region. The tool, once found, is very easy to use: simply enter the keywords and the geotargeting you are interested in to get the estimates:
* On the right there is a box with additional keyword suggestions that are taken from Yandex Wordstat. As I mentioned, I prefer using the Wordstat tool for compiling keyword lists, because even though it is integrated on various stages of creating Yandex PPC campaigns, it is not as convenient. In this case, for example, search volumes for keyword suggestions are not displayed.
Once keywords and geotargeting are selected, simply click “Calculate” and you will be presented with a table like this:
Everything seems to be clear from the first look, try to figure out how much does this keyword actually cost.
Yandex Direct budget forecast FAQ
Indeed, this table that can be a bit confusing. I will try to explain some things I found difficult to understand when I just started working with Yandex PPC.
1. Average CPC is given for 3 placement types. What are these placements?
Unlike AdWords keyword tool, where CPC estimates are given for top position, Yandex calculates CPC for 3 different types of placements, which are defined as:
Premium placement: your ad will be displayed to the left of the page directly above the search results.
1st place: your ad will be displayed first on the right side of the SERP.
Guaranteed placement: your ad will be displayed on the right under the ad occupying the 1st place.
2. Average CPC is shown in y.e. What kind of money is that?
Y.e. is actually not translated from Russian in this case. The abbreviation is similar to something called “coin of account” (cab be also referred to as a “unit”), and equals to 30 Russian rubles in this case.
Using “units” for indicating prices became a common practice in Russia in the beginning of 90s, when the economy was extremely unstable and due to hyper-inflation it was very hard to set prices in rubles. Paying in US dollars, especially for imported goods, was a usual thing, but due to legal restrictions merchant could not write dollar prices on their price tags. That is how y.e. was introduced.
Today y.e. is still in use in Russia, however not to a very large extent, and most of the time equals a price of 1 USD or 1 Euro.
3. The budget forecast is shown in units. What are these units?
The units are the same as y.e. in the average CPC column, and equals to 30 Russian rubles in this case.
Tips for budget estimation for Yandex Direct
Once you are used to it, Yandex Direct is not really complex to work with. However, there are a few things that can affect the performance of your campaigns, positively if you are aware of them, and negatively, if you are not.
Yandex match types
I already wrote an extensive posts covering match types in Yandex, but it is always good to remind: Yandex Wordstat gives search volumes only in broad match. If you are interested in buying phrase or exact matched keyword, use operators ” ” and !. Although it will not change the CPC forecast, estimated impressions and CTR will vary depending on a match type.
Geotargeting and CPC levels
It is not a secret that the majority of Russian online purchases are made from Moscow region, and the PPC space is much more competitive there too. This is why I usually advise to separate Moscow region into a campaign of it’s own. Just compare: the CPC for “доставка цветов “(flower delivery) in Moscow region is between and units, while in the rest of the country (excluding Moscow) it is between 0.68 – 2.3 units depending on a placement type. Selecting Russia as geo-targeting would give an estimated CPC of 4.30 – 4.55 units. Bidding according to this estimate would result into too low positions in Moscow (where most of your customers are) and unnecessarily high positions in the rest of the country.
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.
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.
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.
Keyword insertion is popular feature available in most PPC platforms. By dynamically inserting a keyword that triggers the ad, keyword insertion, when used wisely, helps to increase click-through rates by making the ad more relevant and appealing the the searcher’s eyes.
Most search engines use the same syntax {keyword:default text}, which can be used in any part of an ad: title, ad text, display or destination URL.
Keyword insertion is just as handy for Yandex SEM as for any other search engine PPC program. However, the usage of it can be confusing for us, who are used to Google and Microsoft AdCenter interface. In this article I will try to explain Yandex keyword insertion feature in AdWords/AdCenter terms.
How dynamic keyword insertion works in Yandex
First of all, Yandex refers to dynamic keyword insertion as “ad templates“. Some short information about it can be found in Yandex.Direct help center.
Second, the syntax for dynamic keyword insertion looks like this: #default text#. Unlike Google AdWords, Yandex.Direct does not provide a possibility to choose capitalization. The inserted keyword will look exactly the way you enter it in your keyword list. AdCenter works the same way, which I find quite inconvenient.
Third, if keyword is too long and will cause exceeded character limit, the default text will be shown. The limit for ad title is 33 characters including spaces and punctuation; for ad text – 75 characters including spaces and punctuation. There is only one description like, like in AdCenter.
Example: Yandex PPC ad with keyword insertion operator
Other considerations
- Dynamic keyword insertion will not work with contextual ads, but only available for search ads.
- Inserted keywords will look exactly like in your keyword list, regardless of what work form (singular or plural) or case triggered the ad.
- Russian language has 7 cases. Be careful when using keyword insertion in ad text – if the case is wrong, the ad will not look professional or trustworthy.
- Be careful when using dynamic keyword insertion in destination URL. Spaces between words will be replaced by %20. Cyrillic characters will be encoded in UTF-8.
Dynamic keyword insertion is a very useful feature, but should be used with extreme care. Make sure all keywords associated with the ad make sense in the ad context, both semantically and grammatically. If used correctly, using dynamic keyword insertion will dramatically improve your CTR on Yandex.
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.
I am sure many of you are successfully using Google Display network to drive sales. Yandex has an analog to Google’s display network called Yandex Advertizing Network (also refferd to as YAN or РСЯ in Russian). Until recently it was practically impossible to manage contextual ads in a good way. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, contextual ads could not be separated from search ads. The bid levels were not optimal and the keyword choices limited.
Recently, however, Yandex made a change in their way of handling contextual ads. From now on there is a possibility to separately manage and optimize advertizing on Yandex content network, which gives search marketers new great possibilities of reaching their target audiences in the Russian market.
The main advantage of this new feature is, of course, more flexible bidding. Running display ads in a separate campaign is a big improvement. Now you can adjust bid levels to achieve the desired coverage, which was difficult when the ads were running on search and content network at the same time.
Another great thing is that now the contextual ads can be used the same way as on Google’s display network. Google recommends creating ad groups as “themes” related to your business rather than just selecting keywords. Now you can do similar things with Yandex content ads.
Now, for example, an online shop selling tents could target keywords like “hiking” and “trekking” on Yandex content network to reach out to more potential customers. This was not an option before, when the same campaign had to target both search and content network, as these keywords are way too broad to bid on and would result in poor CTR and unnecessary spend on Yandex search.
Ad formats on Yandex content network
The ad formats are the same as for Yandex search advertizing:
Ad Title: max 33 characters
Ad Text: max 75 characters
No graphical ad formats are available. Yandex content network only supports text ads.
Special syntaxes, such as for example keyword insertion, just like with GDN, are not supported.
How to configure targeting for Yandex display network
Configuring the targeting is very simple. Go to campaign settings -> Strategy and select “Independent management for different site types”.
Configuring targeting for Yandex content network campaign
Then just create your ads, add keywords, set bids, and you are ready to go!
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.
I am sure many of you are wondering how it works with match types in Yandex. They do not provide a description in their Yandex.Direct help topics, and there is no possibility to choose a match type in Yandex Wordstat keyword tool. It took me a while to figure it out as well, and here is my understanding of the whole match type system.
1. The matching option that comes by default
This is important for both interested in Yandex SEO and Yandex.Direct PPC. What Wordstat keyword tool returns as search volumes is probably the closest to what Google would return for a modified broad match.
This means that search volumes in Yandex keyword tool will include impressions for all queries containing all words of your key phrase in any order, in all forms, including plural.
Yandex kyeword tool Wordstat
The prepositions and other stop-words are ignored, like in Microsoft AdCenter, but if you would like to see the search volume for a phrase with a particular preposition, you can use the plus sign in front of it.
Example:
By default search volume for coat with a belt will actually include search volume for both coat with a belt andcoat without a belt.
If you are interested in finding out search volumes for phrases containing the term coat with a belt, you would have to entercoat +with a belt into Wordstat keyword tool.
2. Exact match, the Yandex way
It is possible to set keywords on what AdWords specialists would know as exact match by using quotation marks, which is quite confusing since in Google that would indicate phrase match, i.e. the opposite of what it means to Yandex.
As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, Russian language has 7 cases, which involves changing the endings for all nouns and adjectives depending on a case. Do not worry about that, because all cases are included into Yandex’s exact match as well as plural forms.
If you wish to only bid on exact match of a plural form, for example, you would need to use an exclamation mark in front of the word.
Exmaple:
Key phrase “cheap sofas” will trigger ads for search queries cheap sofas and cheap sofa.
Key phrase“cheap !sofas” will only trigger ads for the query cheap sofas.
3. Broad match, the Yandex way
There is a possibility to include synonyms, mistypes, transliterated words etc. and all the other stuff that Google would include in their broad match.
This feature is called “other relevant phrases” and needs to be manually activated. It is turned off by default.
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.
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 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.
Recent Comments