We figure out how the Yandex advertising network works, whether it is possible to calculate the budget of an advertising campaign in advance, how to evaluate its effectiveness and set it up correctly.
What is YAN
How Yandex Advertising Network Works
Pros and cons
How much does advertising cost in YAN?
Setting up advertising in YAN
Evaluation of effectiveness
Expert advice
What is YAN
Table of Contents
Yandex Advertising Network (YAN) is a system for placing ads on Yandex services and sites of more than 20,000 registered partners. They can broadcast ads in the form of images, text and graphic, graphic and video formats.
The YAN audience is not limited by the generated demand and is based on the interests and behavior of users. The algorithms analyze more than a hundred factors to find the right users for each advertiser. Since advertising in YAN is running on a less warm audience, the traffic may be less consistent and of lower quality compared to Yandex Search. But at the same time, YAN can display more colorful and converting text and graphic ads.
The course “Specialist in contextual advertising” will help you master the intricacies of working with YAN and other platforms . Students learn to identify customer requests and analyze the market, develop a promotion strategy and launch advertising campaigns – and Yandex experts share their experience.
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How Yandex Advertising Network Works
What kind of advertising in YAN will be shown to the user depends on his behavior on the network and flexible ad settings. Algorithms can be based on:
● socio-demographic parameters and interests of the user,
● his usual behavior on the network and search queries,
● keywords,
● visits to certain sites and their sections.
The advertiser can select the geography of impressions and target a specific region, area or city. It is also possible to upload semantics , that is, keywords by which the advertisement will be displayed, and set up the interests and habits of users.
Also, YAN has the ability to transfer segments – for example, if a manager already has a ready-made customer base, it can be loaded and ads can be shown to them or data can be uploaded from Yandex Metrica to Yandex Direct. This will provide more precise settings for the advertising campaign and the ability to directly connect with the audience.
Pros and cons
Pros
✅ Huge reach – millions of users will see your ad.
✅ Possibility of detailed advertising settings taking into account more than 100 parameters.
✅ Dynamic retargeting is possible in YAN.
✅The cost per click in YAN is often lower than in Search.
✅ Graphic and video advertising formats are possible, not just text ads.
Cons
❌ Advertisements may appear on unwanted portals. They can be blocked, but no more than 1000 sites.
❌ It is difficult to accurately determine the cost of a click and the advertising campaign as a whole in advance. You need to test hypotheses and figure out what will work better.
❌ Dynamic retargeting is limited by the Advertising Law and Yandex requirements regarding sensitive topics, such as medicine.
How much does advertising cost in YAN?
The main difficulty of working with YAN is determining the cost of an advertising campaign. It is difficult to accurately predict what the final budget will be and what results it will bring. In Search, advertising is directed at already formed demand; there is a special service called “Budget Forecast”. In the case of YAN, all forecasts are very conditional. An exception is a project that already has data on previous similar advertising campaigns; on their basis, an average media plan can be derived.
There are too many variables to accurately calculate the cost of an advertising campaign in YAN. You can roughly estimate the cost of an advertising campaign in several ways:
● Using benchmarks
average indicators of the effectiveness of advertising metrics in the industry. They help to understand how successfully advertising campaigns, formats, strategies and other tools work and what results to expect.
● Budgeting of YAN on the residual principle
The manager first calculates the budget for Search, and then, in order to expand the audience and obtain new sources of traffic, turns to YAN. The maximum budget is allocated for media planning, and the remainder is spent on testing hypotheses in YAN.
● Using calculations
This is a more complicated, but at the same time more accurate way to calculate the cost of an advertising campaign in YAN:
Step 1. We take as a basis the forecast of the search campaign budget for basic semantics with maximum coverage (100%).
Step 2. We multiply the forecast of impressions by ~50–100.
Step 3. We divide the cost per click by a coefficient of ~2.
Step 4. We apply CTR in the threshold range of ~0.5–0.75%. This result is an approximate waterline.
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Setting up advertising in YAN
When working with YAN, a contextual advertising specialist needs to actively test hypotheses and work with the possibilities of fine-tuning advertising in YAN – the result of the advertising campaign ultimately depends on this. What a contextual advertising specialist should remember: ● URL parameters – we are talking about UTM tags that allow the site analytics system to digitize traffic and understand where it came from.
● Promotion block
it is advisable to indicate periods when there is a discount on the product or a one-time advantageous offer. In this case, the ad will attract more attention.
● Adjustments
the ability to get higher-priority traffic for an additional fee. For example, a manager understands based on site data that most buyers are iPhone owners. He tells the YAN algorithms that he is ready to pay a certain coefficient for clicks from users on the iOS platform. As a result, the algorithms bring in users who are priority for the product. You can adjust the audience by solvency, by those who only watch videos, by a specific region.
● Negative phrases and negative words
help to exclude impressions for inappropriate queries. For example, if you add the negative word “walking” to the keyword “buy an inflatable elephant”, the ad will not be shown for the query “buy a walking elephant”.
● Site monitoring
automatic checking of site availability and stopping of advertising if it is unavailable. This is a controversial point: if a micro-break occurs on the project, the campaign stops. After the site is restored, advertising will not be turned on immediately — time will be lost, and the training of advertising campaign algorithms may be disrupted.
● Experiments
testing different hypotheses. It allows you to understand what best engages users and largely determines the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.
● Safe advertising campaign
allows you to customize where the ad will be shown. In YAN, you can prohibit the display of ads on 1000 sites. The tool helps to make a more precise cutoff and prohibit, for example, the display of children’s or social advertising on adult sites marked 18+. Relatively recently, the settings have been updated with the option “Do not show next to adult content” or “Show only next to adult content.”
Yandex and their advertising network do not display ads that fall under the Advertising Law: calls for violence, drug and tobacco advertising. Such ads will not be able to pass moderation, and YAN may completely block the advertising account because of them.
Even advertising from the sensitive topics section is accompanied by a disclaimer. For example, if it is medicine, there will be a note like “Consult a doctor before use.” The user can always view information about the advertiser, their taxpayer identification number and the name of the legal entity. When an advertisement is moderated, it is assigned an age rating — usually “16+.” It is important to monitor this: if the content is safe and does not require special labeling by law, it is worth changing the rating to “0+” so as not to cut coverage.
Evaluation of effectiveness
You can evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign in YAN using Yandex Metrica and the Report Wizard. It displays conversion, target metrics, impressions, clicks, CTR, expenses, profitability and other data.
Don’t be afraid to spend your budget: hypothesis testing is based on both successes and mistakes. It is important to be careful and not spend your entire budget on one hypothesis. It is better for beginners to start working with YAN little by little, testing different hypotheses. Constant testing of hypotheses and tests is an indicator that the specialist is moving in the right direction.
