VK Advertising is a new platform for setting up and launching advertising campaigns. It has many opportunities, but there are also limitations. In this article, we talk about both.
What is VK Advertising
How to start working in VK Advertising
Possibilities of the new platform
VK Ads Advertising Formats
Audiences and targeting
Examples of using VK Advertising
Expert advice
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What is VK Advertising
Table of Contents
VK Advertising or VK Ads is a new advertising account for promoting products and services on VKontakte, on VK Group platforms and partners, for example, on Odnoklassniki and Mail.ru mail. In fact, the new account is a hybrid of myTarget and the old VKontakte advertising account . The platforms were combined to simplify the work: now instead of several different accounts there will be one.
In the future, the old VK advertising account and myTarget will stop working: the promotion goals in them are already limited. But for now, you can launch advertising from three sites. At the same time, their audiences and ad placements intersect.
Students of the SMM Specialist course learn to set up and launch advertising campaigns on various platforms, including VK Advertising. The training program is adapted taking into account changes in the work of services, so students immediately master the updated advertising accounts.
How to start working in VK Advertising
To start working in VK Advertising, you need to go to the site page , log in and create an advertising account. You can log in via:
1.● VK ID,
2.● Google account,
3.● Mail.ru account.
You can go to VK Advertising directly from VKontakte by clicking on the “Advertising” button in the menu on the left side of the page. Advertisers who did not have an old VKontakte advertising account will be immediately transferred to the registration page for a new one.
In the new account, you can now independently create an agency account to manage several advertising accounts. This is convenient for marketing agencies and freelance marketers who work with several clients. With an agency account, you do not need to switch between advertising accounts. Previously, such an account could only be connected through the site managers.
Access to the accounts can only be obtained after registration in VK Advertising and via VK ID, and not via a link to a VKontakte profile or email, as before.
Possibilities of the new platform
VK Advertising has changed its interface and structure, added new features, and, on the contrary, limited some functions.
Dashboards with statistics
In your account, you can configure which advertising campaign data will be displayed. For example, budget and maximum cost, clicks and impressions, time and type of attribution, conversions to choose from.
To view campaign statistics, you don’t need to go to each of them separately. Data on them is immediately displayed on one tab.
Setting up events
One of the features of VK Advertising that makes the work of marketers easier is the creation of automatic and targeted events.
All analytics are built on JavaScript events that are triggered when a user interacts with a site. For example, when a page is loaded, a PageView event is sent to the site’s data system. Such events can be used to set up goals in a web analytics system, such as Yandex Metrica , or to optimize advertising. JavaScript events are usually set up by developers who need to set a technical task.
VK Advertising works on the basis of the Top.Mail.ru counter. This is a small line of code that is installed on the site. The system will automatically recognize certain events, based on which you can collect data about users who performed certain actions. For example, searched for a product or spent a specified amount of time on the site.
You can also create target events in VK Advertising, for which you can set your own parameters. For example, session duration, number of viewed pages, visiting a site from a specific resource. Or select JavaScript code and specify any event parameters.
Events could be set up in the old VK advertising account, but it is more convenient to do this in the new one. Previously, it was necessary to add a script template from VK to the site code. In the new account, you can set up events for yourself and assign them a value.
For example, on the store’s website you can buy slippers for 100 and 500 rubles. In the old account, there was one event for buying both options. In this case, the system would optimize for selling slippers for 500 rubles, that is, it would try to sell more of them. If the company launched a promotion to increase sales of slippers for 100 rubles, the optimization would work worse. In the new account, you can set that the event – “buying slippers for 100 rubles” – is conditionally more valuable than “buying slippers for 500 rubles.” Then the system will optimize the advertising campaign for a more valuable event.
After setting all the necessary parameters, the platform will issue a line of code that needs to be installed on the site and optimize advertising for these events. For example, if the event is the registration of an application, the platform will attract users who are most likely to do so.
Setting up advertising
The big difference between the two offices is their structure.
1. Campaign
Setting up advertising begins with selecting the promotion object. For example, a website, a VKontakte community, or an application. After that, you need to define the target action, such as impressions, an automatic event, or conversions .
At the campaign setup level, you need to define the budget and terms, and also choose a bid strategy. That is, what will the money be written off for – clicks or impressions. Now there is no manual bid management, they are formed by the ML algorithms of the platform. This means that you cannot set an exact price per click or impression, you can specify a minimum or maximum bid as a guide for the algorithms. At the same time, there is no guarantee that more will not be written off during the campaign training.
2. Ad group
At the next level, you need to set up the campaign ad group: set the country and city where the ad will be shown, select audience characteristics or upload your own lists, define placements, such as the user’s VKontakte feed or the left column. You also need to set up age marking for the ad — this is now mandatory.
3. Ad
At this level, you upload the advertising creatives of a specific ad – logo, images, videos, headlines, texts, and select a CTA from the list.
Thanks to this structure in VK Advertising, you can adjust the settings in all campaign ads at once. You can also duplicate ads or ad groups when you need to make minor changes to them, and then compare the results.
VK Ads Advertising Formats
VK Advertising now has universal entries for promoting all objects — websites, communities, lead forms. This means that formats are now determined automatically when selecting an advertised object. For example, to launch an ad in the carousel format with products, you need to connect a product catalog, and not just upload cards.
At the ad setup level, you need to upload a video no longer than 30 seconds and images in three formats – 16:9, 1:1, 4:5. If you upload fewer image formats, you can choose how they will be cropped when shown on different placements.
Headlines and two texts of different sizes – 90 and 220 characters – are added to the ad. The system itself will select the appropriate option depending on the location of the ad display.
Audiences and targeting
There are three ways to set up an audience in VK Advertising:
1. Set up characteristics manually
You can choose targetings yourself — characteristics and interests of the audience from the proposed list. In VK Advertising, the targets are the same as in myTarget. But there are many differences from the old VK advertising account. For example, now you can’t select marital status, users’ date of birth, or set up display for travelers — users who have changed their location within 14 days. You can’t select education and position separately — these settings have been moved to interests.
To narrow your audience, you can use contextual targeting settings: specify phrases that users use to search for a product or service, or exclude certain words and phrases. For example, add certain brands of cars.
The AND rule works between interests and search phrases. That is, ads will be shown to users with the specified interests who entered certain phrases in search engines. For example, you can show ads to users interested in premium cars who searched for parts for a specific make and model of car.
2. Use the Top.Mail.ru counter
You can install a counter on the site and collect data about visitors. This data can be downloaded at the ad group settings level. You can add Top.Mail.ru counter data to the new advertising account, but not to the old VK advertising account.
A significant disadvantage: now it is impossible to create a Look-a-like audience based on counter data — an audience of users that is as similar as possible in characteristics and behavior to site visitors. In the new Look-a-Like advertising account, the audience is only available when showing ads to subscribers of a certain VKontakte community: the ad can be shown to users who are similar to them. For example, they can be of the same age, be interested in the same thematic communities, or enter similar queries in the search bar
3. Set up display to subscribers
As in the old account, in VK Advertising you can set up display of ads to the audience of the VKontakte or Odnoklassniki community – subscribers or users who interact with it the most. At the same time, you can target the audiences of several communities at once.
4. Using parsing tools
Audience data for ad customization can be collected using special parsing tools such as TargetHunter, Cerebro, Segmento. They will collect information about users who interacted with the community into lists. These lists can be uploaded to the advertising account.
All methods of setting up advertising can be combined. To do this, you need to combine all user lists into one large database: the audience configured manually, the data collected by the counter, and the community audience. This database can be combined with common settings and add an exception for intersection by a certain feature, for example, not showing advertising to users who have already visited the site.
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Examples of using VK Advertising
With VK Advertising, you can promote not only websites, applications, and communities, but also other objects. For example, lead forms, product catalogs, music, or live broadcasts.
Here are the tasks that a company can solve with the help of VK Advertising:
● Save on website creation
A small company does not necessarily need to create a separate website with an online store. You can sell goods and services using a catalog directly within the VKontakte community.
● Increase conversion to application
A low conversion to application may be due to an inconvenient website. In this case, you can try promoting a lead form. It will open directly in the user’s feed and they will be able to immediately answer questions and leave contacts without going to another website. This will increase the likelihood that they will fill out the lead form.
● Attract a new audience
Artists, bloggers and other creators of entertainment content can use the opportunity to promote music tracks and video broadcasts. This way they can attract the attention of new users to their work.
