Advertising in VK communities: launch, setup and marking of advertising in VKontakte groups
Advertising efficiency in VK
Types of advertising in VK
How to identify the audience and needs of the target audience
Selection and analysis of communities
How to place an ad in VK
How to properly label advertising posts
Evaluation of advertising results
How much does advertising in communities cost?
Expert advice
Advertising efficiency in VK
Table of Contents
According to the results of 2023, VKontakte became the second most popular social network in Russia. In the second quarter of 2024, the average monthly audience of the platform grew by 4% – to 87.9 million users. The average monthly reach of VKontakte today is 87% of the entire Russian Internet audience.
It is not surprising that businesses are eager to advertise their products on this platform. Thus, the average monthly number of advertisements increased 15 times last year alone. In the first half of 2024, VK’s revenue from online advertising increased by 20% and amounted to 42 billion rubles.
It is important to note that the most popular and best-known advertising tool in VK is targeted advertising. Many specialists use only it, without interacting with the “Market Platform”. This is a kind of blogger exchange, where you can place packages in the format of seed publications in communities and with opinion leaders.
But targeting is certainly in the lead, taking up about 80% of the budgets used by marketers specifically on the VK platform. It is followed by seed advertising and the use of the exchange.
It should be added that stereotypically all advertising in VK is often perceived as targeted. But in fact, in the last six months to a year, VK has been actively expanding placement and formats. Now on the platform you can use banners, reach and audio advertising, set up advertising in Zen, etc.
The course “Internet Marketer” will help you learn how to attract potential buyers using “VK Advertising” and other tools and create marketing campaigns. The course lasts 7 months, and after graduation, assistance is provided in finding a job in a new specialty.
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Types of advertising in VK
● Targeted advertising , or, as marketers say, target. An example of targeting in VK: a marketer goes into an advertising account and sets up advertising parameters – for example, so that the ad is shown to women in Moscow aged 30-35 who are interested in yoga and small dogs.
● Seeding is advertising placed in communities en masse. An example of seeding: a marketer assumes that the audience for his product is in a certain group. He contacts the community administrator, agrees on the cost and time of placement, and then the post comes out.
We have collected in a table the pros and cons of different types of advertising in VK:
Target
✅ It is a performance tool, which means it lends itself to direct media planning. You can clearly define the parameters of the target audience and estimate the volume of traffic based on the size of the advertising budget
✅ A faster tool – no need to waste time on negotiations and wait in line. Just top up your advertising budget, place an ad and get started
✅ Easy to evaluate the final result and calculate metrics
❌ Strict requirements and restrictions on format and typography: symbols, emoji, bold are prohibited. Only images of strictly defined sizes are suitable
Crops
❌ It is impossible to precisely select the parameters of the audience, only the community. It is not 100% consistent, which means that the concentration of our audience may be lower than planned
❌ The placement process is time-consuming: you need to negotiate with the community administrator, agree on a free slot and wait for the placement
❌ It is difficult to estimate the result in advance – the volume of traffic or the number of clicks
✅ More free form of content in terms of restrictions: you can use emoji, caps, bold, etc.
✅ Large reach and high engagement thanks to native integration
As for the difference between contextual advertising and targeting, in the case of context, we work on already formed demand. Figuratively speaking, someone knocks on our door, we open it. They tell us: “We want to buy bicycles”, and we sell them.
In the case of targeted advertising, on the contrary, we knock on the door. Here there is no guarantee that they will open the door and that the person on the other side of the door needs a bicycle. It is possible that he needs a car or a scooter.
How to identify the audience and needs of the target audience
The principle of targeted advertising is based on targeting: a specialist describes what audience is interesting, and the advertising platform provides exactly these users. The trick is to correctly hit the right audience.
There are many options for defining your audience: for example, analyzing your competitors, seeing what kind of subscribers they have, or targeting your competitors’ subscribers.
You can also look at the portrait of your site’s visitors in Yandex Metrica and find out who buys specific products. Visitors can be segmented by age, gender, geography, and other parameters. For example, if we sell BMX bikes, we will most likely see teenagers aged 15–18 from large cities among the visitors — which means that advertising should be targeted specifically at this audience segment (or their parents).
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Selection and analysis of communities
The essence of selecting and analyzing communities is to understand how real the community is, i.e. whether it has real subscribers and is not filled with bots. This is the primary task of any manager who analyzes communities for advertising placement in them.
To distinguish a live community from bots, you need to request statistics – for example, ask to send a screenshot with all the indicators.
Then you can open the list of subscribers and commentators and see what they are and what the overall activity in the community is, including the ratio of views of posts to the number of subscribers in the group. You should be wary of the abundance of accounts like “Alina, nails in Samara”, “Autoservice Sorting”, “Sushi Lefortovo”, etc. A potential bot is quite easy to identify by standard comments and a profile with a couple of posts.
You can additionally analyze communities using special tools and external services, such as JagaJam, Segmento target or Popsters. In addition, they allow you to enter the parameters of your audience and find communities that include the people your business needs. Using such tools, you can see where there is a closer intersection in order to enter these groups with advertising.
Another white marketing tool when choosing communities to place is to look at where competitors are placed. There is a high probability that the audience of premium bike sellers of different brands will overlap.
It is worth noting separately that there are many parameters for setting up advertising in VK communities: you can target visitors to your site, similar audiences, subscribers to thematic communities, people with certain interests, or users who have entered certain search queries online in, say, the last 12 days. An extensive set of metrics helps to cover the desired audience as much as possible.
How to place an ad in VK
Step 1. Go to the advertising account “VK Advertising”. Remember that here you can set up advertising not only on VK, but also on the VK advertising network. It includes such projects as “Odnoklassniki”, “Zen”, etc.
Step 2. Depending on the goal, we choose the advertising campaign strategy. For example, we want to buy traffic to the site – this is a classic promotion strategy.
Step 3. We set up our ad, that is, we define the ad format and targeting parameters. There are many formats: a universal post, a post with a button, a carousel of several cards, advertising in clips, etc.
For targeting, we select regions and specific cities for display, age, gender, user interests, etc.
Step 4. Upload the advertising creative, replenish the budget and launch the campaign in test mode.
Step 5. We look at the metrics, evaluate the intermediate results, adjust the campaign and spin the full budget.
How to properly label advertising posts
In targeted advertising, it is enough to specify the legal details. In this case, VK Advertising acts as an advertising data operator (ADO) and transfers data for advertisers.
When placing ads in groups, you need to understand who is responsible for labeling the ads: the community or the customer. In any case, the advertising creative must be labeled, that is, it is assigned a token.
There are the following options for placing advertising markings in VK communities:
● indicate erid in the post;
● put a separate banner in VK.
Evaluation of advertising results
The evaluation of advertising results depends on the level at which the analysis is made. In other words, we are considering the intermediate operational or final result.
For targeted advertising, the main metric is CTR, click-through rate . The indicator helps to understand the ratio of clicks to impressions and, accordingly, the level of audience interest in our creative.
CPL (cost per lead) — cost per lead;
CAC (customer acquisition cost) — the cost of attracting a customer;
CPO (cost per order) is the cost of attracting one sale.
These metrics help evaluate the intermediate results of advertising placement.
The final metric is ROMI, return on marketing investment . It shows the overall profitability of advertising, i.e. the difference between invested and returned funds. These are the most important indicators.
The main task of a marketer when evaluating advertising results is to understand how interesting a given traffic channel is. For example, if 10 thousand rubles were spent on advertising and ten orders with a total cost of 5 thousand rubles were received, the advertising is unprofitable, continuing the campaign is not just pointless, but unprofitable for the business.
In seed advertising, the engagement rate of users is assessed first and foremost . It shows how many users liked or commented on a post, added it to favorites, or otherwise interacted with the ad.
Let’s consider the case of the Agoshkov Auto driving school chain . When choosing a community for advertising, the company checks the groups by several parameters: geolocation, number of subscribers, average percentage of audience coverage by the post, and its activity. For batch analysis of communities, the Popsters service is used .
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How much does advertising in communities cost?
The average cost per click when advertising in VK communities is 30 rubles. The minimum advertising budget that will help test hypotheses is in the range of 5-10 thousand rubles. To ensure that leads start actively moving through the sales funnel, you will have to spend another 20-40 thousand rubles. This is a relatively comfortable advertising budget for a medium-sized business.
In the case of seeding, you can place an ad in one community for a conditional 500 rubles. But you need to look at what kind of community it will be and who its users are – bots or real people. It is also important to consider that one-time placement, as a rule, does not give results. You need to make publications constantly, at least 3-5 times, to get results. As a rule, such a set of several publications costs from 5 thousand rubles.
