Advertising in the media is a great way to capture users’ attention and engage them in communication. We have compiled recommendations to help you consider all the nuances and choose settings that will make your communication effective, even if you are launching a media campaign for the first time.
Planning
In the new Direct interface, you can instantly calculate key KPIs, view audience capacity, choose the optimal placement strategy and upload your media plan. This reduces the time it takes to plan and launch campaigns.
Creatives
Banners
Use bright and colorful images. Tests have shown that brands who followed this recommendation increased the CTR of their banners by 46%.
Keep a balance between image and text — it takes less time and effort for the user to notice your ad. This means they are more likely to take a targeted action.
Avoid negative messages in the message. According to our data, such messages in the offer can significantly reduce the CTR of the banner.
Video
- The quality and content of the video itself plays an important role in video placements. The results of the campaign depend directly on the creative.
- Use clips up to 15 seconds in length. The final shots should have a clear brand reference, a memorable and bright back shot.
- Duplicate a closed-captioned video sequence to deliver a message to users whose devices have sound turned off.
- Make sure the brand logo is present at the beginning and throughout the video.
- Add a call to action.
- Use a strong tagline or call to action in a backshot — the last frame of a video that shows a close-up of the product. According to our data, after watching a video with a backshot, people are more likely to visit the site and enter search queries from the video.
Formats
Banners
Upload creatives in ×2x and ×3 resolution to make ads stand out on today’s high pixel density screens.
Add as many images as possible in a variety of formats to extend the reach of your ads.
Most popular sizes:
On desktops 300×250, 300×300, 240×400, 728×90, 300×600 | On cell phones 300×250, 300×300, 320×50, 728×90, 240×400 |
Read the details in the Help.
Use creative tests in Yandex View to evaluate how well your banners meet the expectations of your audience.
Video
Upload all possible formats: horizontal, square, vertical, so that your ads are shown on sites with different layouts. For example, vertical videos can help you communicate better with mobile audiences in a format they are used to.
Run short ads without the skip option to increase views. This option is available for videos up to 15 seconds in length. The average VTR for these videos is over 80%. Please note: Non-skippable videos are only served in streaming ads (in-stream). Read about all formats in the Help.
Add branded elements to your videos right in Direct:
- Logo.
- Clickable text — slogan or offer information.
- Button with CTA, you can set an additional link for it.
Video with branded elements
Try a carousel in a video ad to tell more about one or more products, services, or the brand as a whole. A carousel contains 1 to 15 slides, placed in a sequence you specify. The slides change every 3 seconds, but the user can scroll through them.
Each card has its own landing page, which can be different from the video’s main landing page. This shortens the user’s path to conversion if the link leads to a specific product.
Video banners
Video banner is a media format consisting of video and images. It is displayed on Yandex Advertising Network sites and provides high user engagement due to attention-grabbing video with auto-play. Read more about the format in the Help.
Audience
Wide targeting capabilities allow you to solve tasks at different levels of the funnel: from covering a wide segment to communicating with loyal users thanks to work with the site’s audience and your base. With the help of Krypta technology, Yandex processes a huge amount of anonymized user data: search queries, visits to services and partners, orders and others — and uses it to determine how much users are interested in your advertising.
Today, more than 600 audience segments are available in Direct, covering everything from interests and behaviors to organizations visited and offline purchases. You can use them to target your ads. We have collected all available segments on the site.
Choose relevant audience metrics based on audience affinity based on Yandex Metrics data. Metrics will provide insights into additional interests of the target audience and can suggest the age of users based on their behavior on the site.
Improve targeting accuracy with offline conversion data from your users. You can use your own data to create audience segments. For example, customer information is useful for finding users who are similar to them. This data is stored in your CRM. Set up and test it in Direct to accelerate learning strategies, expand targeting to include look-alikes, and improve ad effectiveness.
Another way to expand your audience is to create a look-alike segment based on those who have already purchased from you.
And to increase impression frequency and optimize cost-per-contact, you can create a segment of those who saw the ad or watched the video and show them lower CPM formats: banners, video banners or a short version of the video.
Use genre and topic targeting to extend the reach of your campaign. This type of targeting allows you to find users not only based on their profile or keyword phrases, but also based on the topics of the pages they visit or the content they are currently viewing. According to Yandex, this increases reach by 30% and reduces campaign CPM by 10-20%.
When selecting genre and topic targeting, keep in mind that you can only select a specific geo in addition to it. You can’t add interests, socio-demographics and other targeting.
Placement strategies
Choose a placement strategy based on the goal of your campaign. For example, if you want to increase the number of audience touches and get more clicks, use the Maximum Impressions strategy. If you want to maximize reach, you may want to use the Lower the Price of Repeat Impressions strategy, but keep in mind that this strategy minimizes frequency and is therefore more appropriate for simple products or well-known brands. If you want to pay only for interaction — a view or a click — use a pay-per-view (CPV) strategy.
The “search lift” strategy will help to increase interest in a brand, product or service in Yandex search. To start this strategy, you should enable Search Lift research in the “Advertising analytics” block of the campaign settings.
The “Site visits growth” strategy will help attract as many new visitors as possible to the advertiser’s site. The prerequisite for implementing this strategy is the presence of a Yandex Metrics counter.
For the Maximum Impressions and Lower Price for Repeat Impressions strategies in Video Advertising, you can separately set the metric by which the strategy is optimized — in terms of conversions or views.
Strategy optimization
In order to familiarize users with the brand, to tell them about a product or a promotion, you can select the “Inspections” display target. According to Yandex, it reduces the cost of inspections by an average of 17%.
The goal “Conversions to the site” is more suitable for attracting traffic and solving brand performance tasks. It reduces the cost per click by 47% on average.
Read more about how the strategies work in the Help.
Frequency of advertisement display
The Frequency of Impressions parameter in DirecTV sets the limit on the maximum number of ad exposures to a user.
We recommend a frequency of at least three times per week, as the goal of media campaigns is to build knowledge. Significant limitations on frequency (one or two impressions per 7 days) can reduce the momentum of spinning.
It should be noted that in programmatic auctions, repeated contact with the audience and therefore additional frequency is more expensive. Therefore, we recommend using the data on the audience reached for retargeting to increase the frequency.
If you are running a video media campaign, set up retargeting for the audience that watched the full version of the video for short-form videos. This will help increase the frequency of exposure to users who watched the full video and optimize the cost of further exposure, as short videos cost less than long videos.
You can also run retargeting campaigns with long-form ads or video banners. They increase the ad exposure and create another opportunity to reach users repeatedly.
Brand Safety
Brand Safety allows you to protect your brand from being mentioned in content with undesirable themes. By default, Yandex Media ads are not displayed in content that violates Russian law, tragic content, and on pages with content giveaways. However, you can extend these settings.
Depending on your placement requirements, set additional settings. For example, you can limit display within the topics “gambling”, “negative content”, “obscene language” or “adult content”.
Note that you can both exclude shows in “Adult Content” and set up shows in it, if you want to reach the audience that is interested in this topic — the audience is available for targeting in the “Genres and Topics” section.
Black list
For media advertising, you can exclude not only individual topics, but also specific resources. You can exclude up to 1,000 sites for banner and video banner campaigns and up to 40 sites for video campaigns. See the Help for details.
Adjustments by format and device
Customize adjustments by inventory and device type for videos and only by device type for banners. For example, if you want to show ads specifically to smartphone users, select ads only on mobile devices.
Performance evaluation
Media advertising is a powerful tool for solving image problems and increasing brand awareness. But its impact is often cumulative and not visible in real time. To make informed decisions about the results of media campaigns, you need the right tools to evaluate their effectiveness.
When evaluating the effectiveness of advertising, take into account all stages of placement. For this purpose, two attribution models are available in the Report Wizard — “First display from Yandex Direct cross-device” and “Last display from Yandex Direct cross-device”. Compare statistics from the two models to understand which ad placement was first and last in the user’s path. This will help you evaluate the contribution of each channel and its effectiveness in the split.
If your advertising campaign budget fits Brand Lift’s terms, order the study and receive additional placement analytics.
Search Lift research will help you evaluate the impact of media advertising on the growth of search queries. It reflects how often users who have seen an ad have searched for a company, product or service.
Visit Lift allows to analyze how advertising has affected the traffic to the promoted site. Both direct and post-view visits are taken into account.
The Sales Lift study based on the EcomAnalytica service helps to assess the contribution of media advertising to actual purchases made on the ecommerce market as a whole, not just on the site being promoted. The analysis is based on sales on partner sites that are connected to the Yandex EcomAnalytica platform. The research is available on request through your Yandex manager.
Customer Journey Map (CJM), a classic methodology for analyzing a user’s journey to conversion, is also available for media campaigns. Examining the sites a user visited before making a target action helps to assess topics of interest and target ads based on the insights gained.
Use Customer Journey Map to find non-obvious targeting and relevant topics that were previously in your blind spot, and increase product interest in new segments.
Graph by semple of the bank’s audience for a month before the conversion. The graph shows the user’s path by topics of visited sites
This and several other studies are available through your manager in Yandex: including O2O, post-campaign and others.
Follow our recommendations when launching media campaigns in Direct to make your ads attractive and reach as many interested users as possible.
