We are always experimenting to try and bring you new types of inventory, new ways to reach your audience. Among our latest additions, there's Live TV. More than 100 channels streaming online on Yandex, along with big cultural and sports events like the World Cup on the Russian 1st channel this year. Advertisers reach their audience with targeted performance video ads appearing seamlessly within this engaging content, replacing TV commercials.
One of the coolest experiments of this year is digital outdoor and indoor advertising (Digital Out of Home — DOOH), which means that we will be able to set up targeted campaigns on billboards and address your audience with relevant cross-platform messages — on screens and in the street.
We have strict visibility standards (50% of the ad in the active window for at least 2 seconds) and several layers of antifraud protection. We filter out many clicks and impressions before they even take place, so that you know you are only buying real impressions and clicks from real users.
Automatic bid correction makes it possible to keep all of this affordable, and only lowers your bids. Yandex algorithms calculate the probability of success for every single user session and correct bids accordingly. This technology increases advertisers' ROI by more than +5%, boosting the value of their interactions with users that they receive for the budgets.
Now let's look at the other side, at the user.
Yandex algorithms work with various types of user-related data — clickstreams, search queries, visited websites, and the content of pages where ads appear. By analyzing such data, we are able to predict the age, gender and income level of specific users while adhering to our strict but user-friendly privacy policies. The impression takes place once these characteristics are checked for matches with your campaign's keywords. Still, a user can get irrelevant impressions, since words have meanings, sometimes multiple meanings. So if your keyword list is too specific or narrow, you may not get enough impressions. YAN has solutions for this too.
Yandex neural networks do not compare lists of words. They take the entire ad text into account and match your ad with users. They do so the same way Yandex search matches a search query to your ad. This way your ad can appear to a user even if your ad text does not contain any of his search queries of behavioral tags.
Design is also something we have automated in YAN. You no longer need to provide us banners or spend time resizing. You can just provide us all the materials you have: texts, video, audio, images and links, and we will automatically generate your ads, designed to fit any environment and bring you the best performance.
We also can generate performance video ads for you.
Another important, high-performance format are smart banners, using our own retargeting technology, and generated automatically from your feed in such a way that each user sees a relevant, customized banner. In general, smart banners bring conversions at one-third of the cost of regular network advertising. Moreover, in addition to bringing back audiences that already visited your site, the same campaign with no additional tuning can attract the same number of new users from your target audience.
Here are some examples of real results from businesses using smart banners:
So I hope it's clear that the Yandex Advertising Network is not just another display network. It's a full-scale performance tool that, when linked with Yandex.Metrica, can also optimize your CPA and ROI.