A new year for Yandex.Direct: Focusing on performance

February 5, 2020

Hundreds of thousands of companies use Yandex.Direct to serve ads. To ensure that it remains an effective means of attracting customers and continues to help businesses grow, we are constantly working on further developing our products and continuously increasing conversion quality and quantity. In this article, we'll review the steps we took toward this goal last year, and what we plan to do this year to make sure Yandex.Direct stays on top of advertisers' needs.

Increasing inventory and bringing products to a single window

New challenges mean that new tools are needed, and arranging communications at all levels of the sales funnel and gathering statistics is far easier when you can do so in one window. Today, Yandex.Direct helps carry out seamless communication and offers a range of tools for brand awareness and performance goals.

For example, last year businesses gained the ability to place digital outdoor advertising via Yandex.Direct and even businesses with smaller budgets can now purchase display banners on the Yandex Home page via auction model. Attention-grabbing interactive formats — like the product gallery and Smart banners on search are now also available to help process demand.

Video advertising has gone above and beyond its traditional capabilities for brand awareness. Interactive elements, new targeting types and tools for assessing their effectiveness mean that video advertising can now take on tasks often referred to as “brandformance.”

The more inventory you have, the more complicated it is to manage. This is why we are trying to simplify creatives and continuing to improve Ad Builder. Previously, to serve ads in the Yandex Advertising Network, you needed to create and edit 12 banner formats. Thanks to the adaptive template, you can create image and display banners for all sizes much faster. Most importantly, when new ad blocks appear, ads in the adaptive template will adjust for them.

Optimized ad management

In 2019, we used 110,000 conversion goals to train algorithms, and were able to classify all actions in Yandex.Direct by whether they are helpful, in the context of the site and business. Today automatic strategies with optimization bring 15% of clicks at at least half the price, and continue to learn and improve.

You can help influence the accuracy of Yandex.Direct's decisions by setting a priority goal, and telling the algorithms about your sales funnel and target actions at each stage. Almost 90,000 companies are already using priority goals.

Automatic strategies are easier to choose in the interface — they help businesses reach their real-life goals and optimize easily quantifiable values: conversions, profitability and income. And advertisers really do choose optimization — the share of budgets being managed automatically has reached more than 50%.

Moreover, we continue working on our statistics so that you can run your campaigns and make decisions based on any data cross-sections that you might need.

Simplified targeting

Thanks to the development of Crypta technology, targeting for any audience in Yandex.Direct is now significantly more precise for both contextual and display ads.

Several years ago, Yandex.Direct only offered targeting for keywords and retargeting criteria. Today, you have access to tens of thousands of combinations of audience targeting, the ability to target users in a specific location, whether it be a business center or the closest metro station to your store, even bid adjustments based on current weather conditions.

∼ 1,5×10⁶⁰ combinations of audience targeting types are now available in digital.

In contextual advertising quite recently short-term interest targeting for Text & Image ads became an option in YAN. This new targeting type allows you to quickly reach out to your target audience based on the interests you choose from the list — without keywords.

Last summer, 37 new target types came to display advertising in Yandex.Direct: now you can show your ads to users interested in, for example, books, snowboarding or children's toys.

Autotargeting also continues to develop. On search, it can help get a placement started with a minimum number of keywords, in ad networks — it uses a range of behavioral algorithms to find as many users from your target audience. We regularly assess the quality of autotargeting's performance: we send assessors 30,000 combinations of banners and queries for assessment once every two weeks. So we track the levels of irrelevant queries for which impressions take place, and improve the algorithms that determine which ads to show.

Today, autotargeting brings 30% of all conversions in ad networks.

Perfecting Turbo pages

Even so, attractive banners and accurate targeting are not enough to convince users to make purchases. If they click on the ad, but don't wait for the site to load — nothing is gained. This is why we continue to make Turbo pages easier and faster for you to set up.

Making Turbo pages is now much simpler: you can choose one of the templates and adapt it for your business. Ad Builder is now more concise, and now offers a great new option — editing texts right in the preview window.

But that's not all. In the Ad Builder in Yandex.Direct, you can now create several linked Turbo pages, even if you have no experience with web design. This is how we make high-quality landing pages available even to the smallest businesses. User experience has also improved overall as the path towards purchase gets shorter and easier.

As a result of all these efforts, Yandex.Direct was able to bring more conversions at lower prices. We will continue working in this direction and are aiming on improving performance for businesses of all sizes in 2020.