Pricing of contextual advertising services

Foreword

In everyday life, we don’t attach importance to the things and services that other people make, some of them, in our opinion, are elementary: what’s so complicated about copying the key of an intercom? He took a similar key, brought it to the device, he automatically copied - voila! What is there complicated soup cook? I bought all the products in a vegetable stall, threw it into boiling water - voila, the soup is ready!
Let's understand in more detail about completely “basic things” from the point of view of organizing a business process.

To copy the key to the intercom you need:

0. Place advertisements on the provision of key copy services in the area where the high permeability of the target audience.
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1. Have the key itself, which will be copied.

2. To have a similar key for which we will copy, and in order to get it you need to know contractors, who trade in them, arrange logistics for the delivery of keys, have an amount to buy these keys, and also understand which keys are interchangeable.

3. Have a programmer who can read the firmware of the first key and sew it into the second key.

4. Have software for the programmer.

5. Have knowledge of how this is done.

6. Have a room in which this activity will be carried out.

7. Have the equipment to test the performance of the new key.

8. Report on the operation performed.

All these items are sewn into the cost of copying a key, so the next time you are given an account of 300 rubles for 5 minutes of work, do not be surprised - since this is not really 5 minutes of work, but much more, just the rest is underwater part of the iceberg.

Similarly, in the field of high technology, only here more and more hidden. Often there is such a dialogue:

- What makes such a high price? I have money, but I believe that your work is not worth so much, freelancers will do it for half of your price!
- You can turn to freelancers. If the results do not satisfy you - we are waiting for you again.

And now I will show why prices can reach great heights in the field of online advertising.

Consider 2 different options for ordering contextual advertising on the example of Yandex.Direct: the secretary in the company's office and a certified agency specialist.

Scenario number 1: secretary

A young secretary Olga with a higher education in humanities is given the task of studying contextual advertising for a week and launching it for a certain company “Horns and hoofs”, which deals with medical services. Olga buys the book “contextual advertising for dummies” and reads 250 pages of this book in a week and, starting to understand how it all works, starts to start conducting an advertising campaign.

In the book, she read that the ad should respond to the user's request and lead to a page with relevant information, since she has little practical experience, she believes that the information on pricing for each doctor is of particular interest to people. She creates a campaign like this:

There are motivating words, the text of the ad is filled for the whole field, and the advantages are indicated, both the address and the telephone, and the words “doctors” are encountered, then she added quick links - in general, she considered that she had made the advertisement for all canons. I set the time for the ads to be shown when the clinic works, and on the advice of the book, put the strategy “Show in the block at the lowest price”. I added a bunch of words to the doctors: “doctor neurologist”, “doctor osteopath”, “doctor therapist” Then she decides to add minus words: “essay”, “wikipedia”, “free”, etc. I replenished the budget and reported to the boss, waiting for the flow of calls from future customers. (I think the familiar situation)

A day passes, two passes, there are still no calls. She enters the account, and there "the word is ousted from the position of special placement by competitors", and there are almost no transitions. Olga raises the price per click, gets back to the special placement. An hour later, the situation repeats. Then Olga remembers that this did not happen, put the strategy “the highest available position.” But then the toad starts to strangle it, since for most sales requests, the cost of a click goes beyond the reasonable 150-200 rubles for the transition, but it still tries this strategy, because competitors are willing to pay so much, it means it is profitable! An hour later, after logging into the account, she sees that the funds in her account are zero. There were no calls, and she, with a gloomy look, reported - “Chef, everything is lost.” And the boss thinks out - the context is not beneficial in the current realities and refuses advertising for a certain period of time.

Scenario number 2: the creation of advertising by a certified specialist

A specialist, an employee of some IT agency, who has a certificate as a specialist in contextual advertising for Yandex, and also has a technical mindset and extensive experience in creating advertising campaigns, begins to work ...
The first thing he does is study the area in which he will have to work: it will take him 2-3 hours of time (of course, it all depends on how well he understands this area). After that, he thinks up the competent account structure with the possibility of scaling, while studying the structure of the site, it will take about another hour.

After that, he launches specialized software for the selection of keywords and the compilation of the semantic core, another 2-3 hours. This includes the primary selection of minus words.

Further, he chases the keywords in the search and looks at which of the competitors has higher CTR, who has higher rates, who has ads like how, and what techniques can be used and borrowed from competitors - this is another 3 hours.

After that, he builds a picture of the universe in his head and begins to think about choosing a strategy and creating ads. He starts writing ads, which can take from several hours to several weeks, and here often there are “attacks” on the part of customers: why so long? Because the specialist is not a secretary and will not make one ad per 100 keywords. Usually it is 2-3 "key" for one ad. After that, he chooses a different pricing policy for the time of day and days of the week, which makes it possible to get the most productive spending of the budget. After he launches advertising and every day he receives statistics with which he works ...

It turns out:

1. In the morning a couple of hours before the start of the clinic, the rate of one transition costs 2 times less, and people who visit the site at this time simply call back in an hour or two, when the clinic starts to work.

2. In the minus words you need to enter the names of the doctors who do not work for them, since the very high traffic at the request is “doctor neurologist Ivanov Ivan Ivanich”.

3. It turns out that many are looking for requests “sanatoriums with neurologists” - this is also a minus word.

4. People search and go to the site even for such requests as “folk medical mantras for treatment” and there are enough such transitions, which means that the person who did not find the mantra on the site worsened the site’s behavioral factors, as well as leaked part of the advertising budget .

5. Conversion of visitors to the site by medical requests is higher, if initially people are not led to the section with services and prices, but to a specially prepared page, with the benefits of a doctor in our clinic, the cost of clicking on this page will be lower.

6. The conversion of a visitor into calls for requests related to diseases is several times lower, but also the cost of one transition for requests is also several times lower: “heart aches”, “cardiologist's call”:


7. And yet, there are days in the clinic when one part of the doctors is not overloaded, and the other is overloaded, and advertising budgets need to be divided. And our specialist also took care of this, because for each medical direction he created a separate advertising campaign.

8. And also the specialist has the software to adhere to the specified strategies, despite the actions of competitors.

9. And from a correctly composed ad, the cost per click can be a difference of 10 times. Yes, yes, you heard right 10 times (the strategy of the “lowest price in special accommodation”):



These two scenarios occurred in relation to me not so long ago, and here is the digital result of the secretary’s error correction:

Secretary:
1 campaign, 60 keywords, 5 ads. The time spent on creating and setting up advertising is 1 day. The cost of 2000 rubles.
Exhaust:
1 call per day for medical directions (it is not very correct to compare here, you need to break into each direction, but still) - 1020 rubles.
(Advertising works at a loss)
0.2 - website conversion into a clinic visitor
2100 - margin from one client
1020 - the cost of one call

Specialist:
16 campaigns, 183 ads, 410 keywords. The time spent on creating advertising 35 hours, the cost of 28 000 rubles.
Exhaust:
1 call costs 220 rubles, the coverage is about 10 calls per day (the clinic is rather narrow, and this figure, according to the director, is a decent result)
(Advertising works in profit)
In monetary terms, 5,920 rubles of profit per day. (I want to note that here the margin minus the doctor’s profit).

Once, having paid 28,000 rubles, and giving a certain amount to maintain advertising activity, the increase in the company's profit per month reached 177,600 rubles.
Not bad, is it?