Yandex unveiled a new service for businesses advertising their products on the company’s websites, as well as websites in the Yandex Advertising Network, at its annual e-marketing conference Yac/m. The new service, Yandex.Audience, allows companies use their own customer information to segment audiences for hyper-targeted advertising, as well as target their ads to existing groups of customers to boost upselling campaigns, improve retention, and increase average spend.

After uploading customer information, such as email addresses, telephone numbers or device IDs, to Yandex.Audience, an advertiser receives anonymised IDs identifying their customers among visitors on Yandex’s pages and the YAN websites. These people can now be personally targeted with offers relevant to their previous customer experience – a pair of shoes matching the bag they bought a week ago, or a special loyalty program to recapture lost customers. The same data can be used to identify lookalike audiences – groups of people who exhibit characteristics similar to those of the existing customers and are likely to be interested in the offers that the existing customers were interested in – and target ads to them.

Yandex.Audience is available in English and Russian. To start creating hyper-targeted ad campaigns, an advertiser needs to sign into their account with Yandex’s auction-based service for contextual advertising Yandex.Direct and enter their customer data in the .txt or .csv file. The IDs returned by Yandex.Audience can not identify any individual user, but can be used for delivering personally targeted ads.

Medium- to large-scale businesses such as retailers, banks, car dealers, insurance companies, possessing reasonably large amounts of customer data and striving for customer conversion will appreciate this service most. The amount of data required for hyper-targeted advertising starts at 1,000 records. There is no upper limit for the number of records that can be uploaded to the service, neither is there a limit for the number of types of audiences or hyper-targeted advertising campaigns.

In addition to hyper-targeting opportunities, Yandex.Audience will soon be providing tools for marketing analysis. Yandex's proprietary behaviour analytics technology Crypta, which can identify web users’ interests, age, gender, family status, and even if they have a car or a pet, based on their behaviour online will soon be added to the service. Thanks to this technology, advertisers will be able to use social and demographic statistics of their audiences to plan their marketing strategies.