What's new
In the past, you selected the templates you liked, uploaded your feed, and Yandex.Direct generated smart banners for your products. Now, Yandex.Direct can do even more: from that same feed it can generate Text & Image ads for individual products that look like this:
Moreover, this doesn’t require any effort from your end! Yandex.Direct already has enough data to create the ads automatically. According to the latest data, smart banners can receive twice as many target clicks with no decline in their conversion rates.
Limits for certain categories
These automatically generated ads are not yet available for real estate, hotels, plane tickets, and jewelry. If you place ads for these categories, know that we are working hard to offer new placement types in the near future. Smart banners for all other categories are already attracting more target traffic with this new display method.
How and why high-quality traffic increases
In short, smart banners will now win auctions for your target audience with greater frequency. In the past, smart banners took up an entire ad block, where several Text & Image ads could otherwise appear.
Taking up an entire ad block does make your banner more noticeable. At the same time, it decreases the likelihood that your banner will win auctions. Think about it — in order to win, your one banner should perform better and get more clicks than several separate Text & Image ads.
Now, your (whole) smart banner will enter auctions alongside individual offers within it. If you are unable to win the auction for the entire ad block, you still have a chance for at least one of your products to make it into an available spot as an automatically generated Text & Image ad. The product chosen from your feed in this case will be the one determined to be most interesting to the specific user. All in all, the total number of impressions for your target audience will increase.
You can find out more about smart banners in the help section. To get access to this format, contact your Yandex manager or an ad agency.