Interview with Yandex Global Sales Director Bernard Lukey

As businesses around the world are moving more and more of their advertising budgets towards performance marketing, they pay more attention to conversion rates for mobile traffic and are falling in love with video-enabled ads. Yandex not only observes these same trends in Russian market, but is helping shape them. We asked Bernard Lukey what tools Yandex offers its clients to achieve their goals and respond to global trends, which industries yield the biggest revenues from their business in Russia, and which areas are still developing.

It has been a long time since Yandex.Direct moved from being a search advertising tool for responding to customer demand to a versatile marketing platform providing solutions for every step of the customer journey, in multiple formats and with a variety of buying models.

Eugene Lomize, Director of Strategic Development at Yandex, spoke at the YES conference about the direction Yandex.Direct is currently moving, what has already changed, and why autopilot marketing is so important. Let's have a look.

Mikhail Bilenko, Head of Machine Intelligence

Yandex has always been about intelligence. In the beginning, there was search, and search was about getting all the information on the web and serving it right to every person. But the world has changed since then: everyone has moved to mobile, and intelligence now is about getting information about the world around us, about services and, most importantly, communication.

The Yandex voice assistant, Alice, is also all about intelligence, and even more. Being summoned by “Hey, Alice” and answering user questions, it seems very simple. But let's have just a quick glance under the hood.

Herman Tsarev, Head of Audience Targeting

The most exciting part of technology without a doubt is data. If your goal in digital marketing is performance or display advertising, Yandex.Audience is definetely a tool that will help you to answer your questions with the data you have in a meaningful way.

Olga Erykalina, Advertising Technology Development

The Yandex Advertising Network reaches millions of people daily, including the majority of Russian online population. We are able to do this with the help of thousands of our partners, so if you want to reach an audience of Russian publishers with CPC-based targeted advertising, you have come to the right place.

Denis Zlobin, Project Manager

We believe that the top questions on the app marketers' minds today are: Where to scale next and where to get more users? Is user acquisition enough? How can I save time on boring tasks and do more creative work instead?

Previously available to some of our clients as a closed beta, Direct's Turbo pages are now available to everyone.

Web page loading time, as well as website quality, is crucial when someone is looking for a product or service to buy online. Direct's Turbo pages boost your conversions and improve your customer engagement on mobile by providing you with a quick-loading mobile landing page, instead of a page that takes ages to load, doesn't load at all, or is simply not designed for viewing on smartphones or tablets.

Two new age groups have appeared for bid adjustments and statistics in Yandex.Direct. They will allow advertisers to show ads to their target audiences with greater flexibility and precision.

Display campaigns are a new auction product available in Yandex.Direct with CPM payment. Display campaigns allows you to show HTML5 and image banners in the Yandex Advertising Network to audiences with the characteristics and interests that you determine.