The coefficient scale has been increased for bid adjustments for age and gender, as well as bid adjustments for website visitors. Now you can set a coefficient increase of +1200% to the original bid for an ad group or campaign. This is aimed at users who are potentially very profitable for you. Such users would be those that have already visited your store and bought something expensive in the past.
In addition, you can now stop serving ads altogether for part of your audience by using a coefficient decrease of -100%, meaning you can assign individual bids and serve unique ads to users with different characteristics.
For example, you are advertising mortgages which offer clients different credit programs depending on their age. With this new feature, you can create multiple separate campaigns for different audiences whereby individual ads with their own bids are served to said audiences for the same queries.
These new coefficients can be configured in the Yandex.Direct web interface, the Yandex.Direct API, and in Direct Commander.
You can read more about bid adjustments in the relevant help section.
Nuances of targeting ads at a clearly-defined audience
The people that buy particular products may not only be your target audience, but also their relatives and friends of any age or gender. For instance, men’s clothes or fishing equipment are frequently bought by women as gifts. Young mothers buy baby food frequently, but so do fathers and grandparents. You will encounter many such cases where a product can have a diverse audience.
In contextual advertising, a strict segmentation of who makes up the demand for a product and cutting off supposedly “unnecessary” groups of users can significantly affect your audience and cut off a large percentage of impressions and clicks. After all, when any user searches for particular products on Yandex, their interests are clearly indicated by their search query. This means that any user could be your next potential customer, irrespective of their demographic.
This strategy of cutting off part of your traffic is justified only if you know your audience well, that you keep track of your return on the cost of attracting them, and that you regularly analyze which users are most profitable for your business.