One thing remains true regardless of whether you are promoting furniture, toys or drills — advertising works best when users see things that interest them. This is exactly what smart banners do: automatically generate ads for potential customers using your feed to respond to users' real interest. Many advertisers have already discovered smart banners' value as an effective tool for retargeting and generating sales in the Yandex Advertising Network — here are just a few success stories. Now Yandex.Direct can show smart banners on search, and we have begun testing their performance. Here is where they can appear:
- In premium placement or below search results, i.e. where Text & Image ads typically appear. They do not look any different, and there are no additional restrictions.
- In the product gallery below search results, where goods from Yandex.Market and dynamic ads already appear. As the name of the block makes clear, only ads for products can appear here.
How does it work?
A search query is a clear, strong signal that a user is looking for something at this very moment. Smart banners on search offer a unique opportunity to take advantage of this exceptionally relevant interest.
In contrast to YAN and external networks, where smart banners appear based on retargeting lists or behavioral targeting, users on search will only see these ads if they enter a relevant search query, e.g. the model of drill included in your product feed.
Yandex.Direct will automatically compose a unique ad text below each product in your feed — the same way it works in smart ads. If you wish to compose your own texts for each product yourself, simply add them to your feed: now you can replace any value in the feed with text for smart banners.
How will smart banners compete with regular ads on search?
The same way that regular ads currently compete with each other — Yandex.Direct takes a wide variety of factors into account and chooses from all the advertiser's formats the one likely to be the most effective.
How do smart banners appear on search?
Testing is open, so any advertiser on Yandex.Direct can choose to enable smart banner impressions on search.
In the strategy settings, you can now choose where your smart banners can appear: on all sites, only on search or only in ad networks.
To make sure interested users on search see your ads, go to the filter settings for your feed and select a target audience based on the criteria "Showed interest in similar products on the internet" or "Both groups." The "Viewed products on my site" targeting type will not work on search — it can only be applied to ad networks.
And what about statistics?
A new "Search queries" report will appear in the statistics for smart banners. There you will be able to see which queries caused your banners to appear. If any of these queries seem irrelevant, you can add them to your negative keyword list directly from the report.
You can find out more about setting up smart banners on search and ad networks in the corresponding Help section.
