Target users by interests in Text & Image ads with just one click

January 30, 2020

Text & Image ads in Yandex.Direct can now be targeted for short-term user interests when appearing in the Yandex Advertising Network. This new targeting type gives you an easy way to reach out to your target audience via the interests you select from the list — and you don't need to create a keyword list first.

Making high demand easier to handle

Short-term interests update in real time and contain segments of users who are currently interested in specific topics. This allows you to make relevant offers to users likely to be interested in them without needing to constantly update your keywords.

Let's say you want to tell users who are currently planning their holidays about a sale on plane tickets. Simply select the “Tourism” interest, and you won't need to manually choose keywords, negative keywords or add operators.

Interests help:

tell potential customers about discounts during seasonal promotions,
quickly launch campaigns, if you don't have time to select keywords,
expand your reach of your target audience in campaigns with keywords and find new customers.

How it works

Precise targeting of your target audience is made possible by Crypta, Yandex proprietary machine learning technology that analyzes users' online behavior and determines which groups they belong to. Crypta analyzes the behavior of typical members of this group, e.g. the words they use in search queries, which sites they visit, and what times of day they are online.

Short-term interests showed strong results during closed experiments. You can read about the results of one of the participants below.

Case 1: Targeting for short-term interests. Household appliances and electronics

Comparison period: November

Goal: Test short-term interest targeting in one product category.

Result: Use of the new type of targeting in ad networks helped increase CR for the entire placement by 11% and decrease CPC and CPA by 9%.

Case 2: Targeting for short-term interests. Retail. “Electronics” category

Period: November-December 2019

Goal: Test short-term interest targeting via A/B testing

According to the A/B testing results, the campaign using targeting for short-term interests showed better results: the CR in this campaign was 45% higher, and CPA was 9% lower than the campaign with keyword targeting.

Setting up interests

You can enable targeting by user interests in the Yandex.Direct interface, Direct Commander and the Direct API.

To set up impressions for your target audience in the interface, go to the User Profile section of the ad group edit page and select interests for your potential customers.

You can show your ads to users interested in business, household appliances, food, beauty, animals, education and many more. There are 19 interest categories in total currently available. You can refine your target audience within each category and choose, for example, within the Finance category just those users looking for credit.

In the user profile, you can choose up to three sets of interests linked with “AND.” You can choose up to ten interests connected by “OR” in one set. Profile settings combined with keywords and retargeting will work according to the “OR” principle, but with “AND” in relation to bid adjustments.

Let's say that you offer consumer loans and are looking for users who are just beginning to consider their options. Your target audience might be planning their honeymoon or to do much needed renovations at home, motivating their search for a source of finances to make them possible. In this case, you can set “Honeymoon” and “Renovation” in the first set of interests, and for the second one — “Loans.” The ad will appear to users who are planning their honeymoon or renovation, and who plan to take out a loan to cover the costs.

You can find step-by-step instructions on how to set up targeting by user interests in the corresponding Help section.

Analyzing statistics

Statistics for short-term interests are only available in Report Wizard. To check them, select the “Impression criteria” or “Type of impression condition” cross section, add the “Retargeting lists” filter, and specify the audience name that you saved in your profile. The data obtained will help you understand how your ads using targeting for short-term interests are performing.

These statistics do not appear in Yandex.Metrica, but a report on long-term interests is available. This report can help you analyze the needs of your audience, for example, whether retargeting would come in handy in your campaigns.

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