In order for an advertising campaign to bring good results, it must be optimized regularly. We talk about the goals, methods and strategies of advertising optimization.
Why do you need advertising optimization?
Campaign optimization goals in Yandex Direct
Advertising Campaign Optimization Methods
Contextual Advertising Optimization Strategies
Expert advice
Why do you need advertising optimization?
Table of Contents
Advertising campaigns in Yandex Direct need to be optimized so that conversion increases and the marketing budget is spent wisely. After launching advertising, statistics may show that some ads brought a lot of orders, others are highly clickable, but there were few purchases from them, and others even had few clicks.
For example, if the advertising campaign has chosen the CPC (Cost per Click) payment model, then the budget for ads that do not generate orders will be wasted. As a result, without optimization, advertising will be unprofitable, that is, it will not bring good enough results.
It is also necessary to develop an advertising campaign to maintain the interest of the audience. This is especially important for long-term promotion: over time, the audience may stop responding to creatives and USPs – unique selling propositions of the brand, so they need to be changed periodically. This is also considered optimization of advertising in Yandex.Direct.
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Goals of campaign optimization in Yandex Direct
There are three main goals for optimizing marketing campaigns:
1. Increase in sales
The ultimate goal of any promotion in Yandex Direct is to increase the number of orders and business profits. The key goal of advertising optimization is to increase conversions into sales.
2. Increased advertising payback
It is estimated using the ROI indicator — Return on Investment. If the advertising expenses — its budget, product cost, contextual advertising manager salary — are lower than the income from the campaign results, it is considered effective. Advertising optimization allows you to control and increase your income from it.
3. Competition
Direct promotion works on the auction model: each advertiser sets a bid — how much they are willing to pay to show their ad to the desired audience. The auction is won by the ad with the highest bid. During the campaign, competitors can adjust their bids, which changes the ad positions in search results. Therefore, each advertiser needs to periodically optimize their bid strategy.
You can learn how to properly conduct analytics and optimize marketing campaigns in Yandex.Direct on the course “Specialist in contextual advertising”. In 4 months of training, students receive the necessary skills and knowledge to work with context and collect a portfolio of 6 projects.
Advertising Campaign Optimization Methods
Methods for optimizing promotion in Yandex.Direct, which are used by contextual advertising specialists:
● Keyword adjustments
When launching an ad, you need to specify a list of keywords in response to which users will see ads. When optimizing a campaign, it is worth checking which queries are producing results and disabling ineffective ones.
● Working with creatives
If an advertising campaign involves images, it is useful to analyze the effectiveness of each of them or add new options during optimization.
● Working with texts
When optimizing campaigns with text and text-and-graphic ads, you can change their titles and descriptions. For example, add a keyword to the title – this will make the ad more noticeable in the search results and increase the CTR – Click-Through Rate, the clickability rate of advertising in Yandex.Direct.
● Change the payment model
For example, when launching a campaign in the Yandex Advertising Network, the CPC model was selected – Cost per Click, payment for click. However, analytics showed that the cost per click is too high. In this case, you can change the model to CPA – Cost per Action, payment for target actions, and specify a transition to the site or purchase of a product as the goal.
● Adjusting the landing page
When optimizing advertising in Yandex.Direct, you need to pay attention to which section of the site it leads the user to. For example, an ad for the query “buy a drill” should lead to the section of the site with drills, and not to the entire catalog of tools. This will save time and effort for potential buyers, and also increase conversion.
● Changing the format
To launch advertising in Yandex.Direct, you can use the Campaign Wizard — a semi-automatic way to create ads based on a website with minimal settings. When further optimizing your promotion, you can change the universal formats of the Campaign Wizard and choose those that show the best results — for example, text and text-and-graphic ads.
● Audience adjustment
When analyzing campaign statistics in the Yandex.Direct Report Wizard, it is worth paying attention to the portrait of the target audience. For example, it may turn out that the brand’s offer is more interesting to men than to women. Then it is worth optimizing the campaign by redistributing part of the budget to the male audience.
● Disabling ineffective ads
If all previous optimization methods do not work and some ads still show low results, they should be disabled to avoid wasting your budget.
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Contextual Advertising Optimization Strategies
Optimization of advertising campaigns in Yandex.Direct largely depends on the analytics of marketing KPIs — key performance indicators of promotion. The main strategies for optimizing contextual advertising based on these indicators:
● Increase CTR
Used when the ad has many impressions, users perform the necessary actions when going to the site, but the number of clicks on the ad is small. In this case, keywords, texts and creatives are adjusted . ● Decrease CPC. Suitable if the promotion gives good results, but clicks on the ads are too expensive. To reduce CPC, rates and keywords are usually adjusted.
● Conversion improvement
Depends on the campaign goal. For example, it is suitable when sales growth is important, and analytics show that the ad has many clicks to the site, but few orders. Then you can work with the landing page or change the bid strategy.
● Increasing ROI
Suitable for situations when promotion shows good results, but the cost of it exceeds the income. Here it is worth trying all the methods of advertising optimization in Yandex.Direct.
All strategies for optimizing marketing campaigns in Yandex Direct are based on the HADI hypothesis testing method, which consists of four steps:
1. Hypothesis.
2. Hypothesis testing.
3. Data collection.
4. Insights.
For example, when analyzing an advertising campaign, it is clear that ads with red creative bring the best conversion, while those with blue and yellow are ineffective. A contextual advertising specialist puts forward a hypothesis: if only red images are used in ads, the promotion results will improve. He optimizes the ads by changing yellow and blue images to red ones. After two weeks, statistics show that the indicators have not changed much. The specialist concludes that the high efficiency of ads is not related to color. He puts forward the next hypothesis, for example, that the matter is in the ad headlines, conducts text optimization, tests the changes, receives data, draws conclusions based on it, and so on.