More than 50% of YAN visitors are not included in the Yandex Search audience, so advertising in the Yandex Advertising Network can significantly expand the reach of your ad campaigns. In this article, we've put together a list of tips, recommendations and success stories based on other Yandex.Direct advertisers' experience.

1. The nuances of ad formats

• Use all available ad formats. Upload creatives in as many sizes as possible, or use the formats suggested in Ad Builder. The more formats you use, the more sites your ad can appear on and the broader your reach will be.

  
   

• Check how your ads are displayed.  Check the preview in the interface to make sure that changing sizes does not make the ad less attractive. The text should be easy to read and the picture should not be cropped.

  
   

• Add a button. Having a "Select" or "Buy" button on your page is a subtle way to encourage users who visit your site to take the next step. Adding a button is easy in Ad Builder — just go to the "Button text" section.

  
   

• Make sure your ad is relevant to your product or service. Your ad text should correspond to the description of your product or promotion on your site, and any images should likewise reflect the subject of your ad. The more relevant your ad is, the lower your bounce rate will be.

  
   

• Avoid images with large text or logos. Texts within images can clash with the ad's text, making it difficult to read and unpleasant for your audience, who are then less likely to click on your ad.

  
   

• Define your target audience. If there are legal restrictions for what you are advertising, make them clear by adding warnings or age limits to your ad. Sometimes it can be difficult to set up ads for a specific audience, for example, for medical products and services. In this case, in the banner should add clarification, for example, "Recommended for children 3 years or older." Specifying a limit will help avoid irrelevant clicks.
• Adapt your offers for different audiences. Advertising the same products to different audiences requires different ad texts. For example, if you are advertising winter hats and targeting young people, your ad texts could emphasize that they are stylish, whereas ad texts intended for their parents ought to point out that they are made of high-quality materials and help keep warm in winter.

  
   

2. Working with ad texts 

• The ad title should mention what is being advertised. Some ad blocks might show only the image and the ad title. To guarantee that users understand what is being advertised, make it clear what you are promoting.
  In Image ads, you can use the "Main text" field to mention your unique selling point, as shown in the example below.

  
   

• Use ad extensions. Adding extensions like images, video, callouts and sitelinks to your Text & Image ads will increase their effectiveness. The more content you upload to the system, the more ways your ads can appear for different audiences on different host sites.
• Use negative keywords and operators prudently. Don't add related keywords from your negative keyword list, e.g. one related to reviews or photos of the products you are advertising. In campaigns for ad networks (in contrast to search campaigns), quotations marks are generally unnecessary  —  they cut off your target audience and limit your reach instead of refining your keywords.

  

3. Campaign settings

•  Carefully choose your keywords. If you have a small budget, it's especially important to concentrate on the most relevant keywords. If your budget is larger and you want to maximize the number of conversions, add more related keywords. You can select the most relevant queries from WordStat right in the interface. Yandex.Direct's algorithms are set to attract the highest quality impressions while remaining within your set CPA.
   

  Precise queries for a limited budget	Broad queries for a larger budget
  hotel in Rimini five stars Yandex.Money virtual card	holiday in Italy online banking

• Gone are the days of waiting to use automatic strategies. You can launch Text & Image campaigns or Dynamic ads with the "Average CPA," "Weekly budget" and "Optimization of goal conversion rate" strategies right away, without waiting to accumulate statistics.
• Increase your bids depending on customers' engagement levels. Segment customers by ROI or their progress through the sales funnel and raise bids for the "hottest" ones.

  

• Engage your customer base. Create a segment of users who have already made purchases or use your services. You can then target this segment with offers for additional purchases like accessories for previously purchased products.
• Don't overburden your campaign with overly strict budget limits. If you go too far in limiting your campaign budget, you risk ending up with unevenly distributed impressions. If this happens:

  • Try increasing your weekly budget and check if your target CPA improves.
  • Limit your reach by narrowing down your keyword list, adding negative keywords and setting negative bid adjustments for less effective audiences.

• Be careful when optimizing. If your campaign has little traffic and conversions despite not having budget limits:

  • Add broader keywords, including branded queries and those of your competitors. Revise your negative keyword list and your blocked sites.
  • Review your bid adjustments and your target CPA. If competition is high, the values you've set might not be enough to win auctions.
  • Optimize your campaign according to your most important goals. If you are advertising cars, for example, it makes sense to use a goal that reflects your audience's real engagement level, e.g. signing up for a test drive. You can check the cost of such a conversion in your search campaign and set this value as your target CPA.
  • Make sure that you are using enough formats for your ads, and that they aren't competing with your other ads.

4. Bid adjustments and sites

• Set your bid adjustments in proportion to their deviation from your target values. You can use the following formula to figure out the right value:
  Bid adjustment for an audience = 1 - Target СРА / Actual СРА

  Let's look at an example:

  

• Analyze segments of similar users. Create a segment based on Yandex.Metrica data, e.g. "Added product to cart but did not pay" or "Viewed more than three pages." Show your ads to these segments without bid adjustments and analyze their behavior. Once you have statistics to determine which segments perform best, you can base a Look-alike segment on them and raise bids for these users.
• Review your list of blocked sites on a monthly or quarterly basis. Many sites work on their content to increase their traffic and improve their quality of their audiences. As they do so, sites that were previously worth blocking can become valuable traffic sources. We recently added recommendations to the Yandex.Direct interface to help make it easier to figure out which sites are worth unblocking.

If you'd like additional help with setting up your campaigns, your can always reach out to your Yandex manager or the customer service department. If you are willing to share your own tricks that help you with your YAN campaigns, tell us about them in a comment below. We will keep them in mind for future articles. Good luck with your campaigns!