Online Advertising Roulette: Yandex.Direct, Google AdWords

Any entrepreneur, be it a startup owner or market leader, needs to be advertised. For IT campaigns, the shift of advertising sites on the Internet is obvious. It is necessary to begin the search for placement opportunities, as an incredible amount of advertising agencies, aggregators, sites again falls on the beginning advertiser. And many get off, sign contracts, are conducted on free offers and tempting test periods. As a rule, this leads to an increase in advertising costs with a small or zero result. At the same time, there are few basic (and effective) ways of placing search and contextual display ads. In Russia, these are Yandex.Direct and Google AdWords, for those who are interested in advertising abroad, Bing and Yahoo networks are added.



I have gone the way of online advertising, stuffing a lot of cones on it and spending quite some money. In my post, I want to present basic tips that are likely to be useful to those who come out with advertising on the network for the first time and have too little budget to spend on experiments and unreasonably risk.

Yandex.Direct

According to the latest data, the share of requests in Yandex is just over 60%, respectively, at first glance, the majority of the target audience of companies lives in Yandex. However, to argue this way is a direct way to a dead end: a lot depends on the age and interest of users, on the category of devices and so on ... There are many ways to determine where your audience lives, two main and simplest of them:

1. compare the number and structure of relevant queries in the "Yandex" Wordstat and "Google" keyword selection tool;
2. view Yandex.Merik and / or Google Analytics connected to your site and draw conclusions.

So, Yandex.Direct is a service for advertising on a search and in the Yandex advertising network. Allows you to be placed on various positions in the search results, in Yandex services (weather, mail, news, etc.), as well as on partner sites.
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What is good about Yandex.Direct?

• The network of Yandex partner sites consists of high-quality sites that are relevant to the needs of the advertiser. There are few “empty” sites or resources created for advertising.
• Yandex.Direct practically does not impose requirements on the quality of landing pages for advertising - in any case, with a low level of compliance of the landing page and the announcement of special sanctions or a decrease in the number of impressions will not follow.
• Yandex.Direct allows you to insert images into ads. This is a great opportunity to draw attention to your ad in the contextual network. For pictures, there are certain requirements that are easy to meet. Unfortunately, Yandex has banned the display of pictures with the company logo or its name.
• Direct is easy to manage both through a web interface and through Direct. Commander, in which you can make group processing, make changes, create ad groups.
• Direct is constantly evolving and includes convenient statistics for monitoring campaign results.
• Direct has a set of flexible advertising strategies that allows you to work with almost any budget.
• Yandex.Metrica is a simple and convenient primary analytics tool with great features. A new beta has just been released - the tool has become even more powerful.
• In general, with the correct settings, the level of conversion failures from advertisements is 10 percent lower than in Google.

What's wrong Direct?

• Popular Direct bid rates are most often higher than AdWords. And recently this trend is catastrophic. So, for display in the first place, for example, on the word “crm” in Yandex 57.21 cu (1716 rubles), and on Google - 104 rubles. Of course, in fact, both that and that rate are somewhat lower, but the proportions remain.
• You can get some settings for advertising strategies only through a personal manager.
• Dear, difficult in targeting and incomprehensible display advertising (advertising banners).
• Before the start of the campaign, if you are selling software or other intellectual property, you need to make and send a guarantee letter - not the most embarrassing moment, but it takes time to start the campaign.
• Not the most convenient interface for creating and managing ads, subjectively - even the Commander does not fill this gap.

Tips for Yandex.Direct

• Set a daily (weekly) budget limit to estimate your actual advertising costs and not go down the drain.
• Try to select not common words, but words from “delta-surroundings” - similar in subject and essence, but in less precise formulations.
• Use addresses, additional links, phone numbers and dynamic inserts in ads. But with the mind.
• Use retargeting if your site suggests appropriate actions.

Google adwords

Google’s position on search is somewhat weaker than on Yandex, but this does not detract from the possibility and necessity of advertising on Google and its network. First of all, because Google is used on Android mobile devices, Google Chrome continues to conquer users, Google AdWords can be advertised in apps and on YouTube. And this is a lot. In order not to be unsubstantiated, I will give my personal statistics, for obvious reasons, without reference to the company (for relevance, I’ll make a reservation that the sphere is IT, B2B services): almost 45% of site visitors come from the Google Chrome browser, with Google search - just over half of all visitors.

So, Google AdWords is a service for advertising on search and in the advertising network (CMS) Google. Allows you to be placed on various positions in the search results, in Google services (mail, YouTube), as well as on partner sites.

How good is Google AdWords?

• Flexible, customizable user interface for managing all parameters: rates, ads, words.
• Rates for popular queries are lower than in Direct.
• More tools for hints: keyword matching, CCM planning, Google trends, Google Analytics data.
• The most powerful web analytics tool is Google Analytics. Absolutely amazing platform, allowing you to know about your site and visitors almost everything. Paired with Metric makes you armed to the teeth in the face of any advertising activities on the Internet.
• Excellent remarketing opportunities - both text and banner. With a fairly low cost, you get little conversions, but your brand awareness is growing in the network. And at first (and then) - this is one of the main trump cards.
• Excellent platforms for advertising in mobile applications, on mobile devices and on YouTube using a single AdWords interface.
• To start a campaign you need a good, clean site, a little time to create a campaign - and no letters. Ideal for a quick start, when advertising was forgotten in the heat of the project preparation. Moreover, the requirements for the site are strict only at first glance, there are few restrictions and we still have to try to get under them.
• You can see many statistics and user queries directly in the platform interface, without using other analytics.

What's wrong with Google AdWords?

• Every year, the pool of Google partner sites is getting worse and worse, and accordingly, advertising on the content and media network is losing its usefulness significantly.
• In AdWords, interesting features such as targeting by device or operating system are disappearing. Probably, they are not very necessary for the general mass of advertisers, but for the IT sphere they are simply irreplaceable.
• AdWords is extremely demanding on sites and landing pages - if your site is admitted to advertising, it’s not a fact that the page will be relevant. A mismatch between keywords and ads leads to a huge decrease in impressions.
• Sometimes statistics is delayed. As a rule, it is not critical for working with advertising.
• If you do not follow the account, it may surprise you with a sudden increase in value or a drop in impressions. However, this is true - do not forget about their work.

Tips for google adwords

• Follow your account, work, update ads.
• Track the quality of the site and landing page.
• Use remarketing.
• Limit your daily budget and at the same time remember that Google can exceed it slightly.
• Carefully follow the sites in the CCM, turn off unnecessary places to display your ads and irrelevant sites.
• Use all kinds of ad extensions.
• Work with geo-targeting: for example, in general, it’s worth choosing the “people from target location” policy. Those interested in them can eat off the budget, but not bring results. For example, a student from Saratov who is writing a course paper on “Automation of Food Production” is interested in Moscow. It is highly likely that he will click on your ad, go to the site, but in no case will he even become a potential client. And then he can be shown remarketing and you will again pay for his click, because he hasn’t completed the coursework yet, and you already know him.

General tips and tricks

Reach your own employees for online advertising , not third-party agencies. First of all, because no one knows your campaign goals and product capabilities better than your employees. For example, for a manager from an advertising agency, the key word “boring wheels” is strict and unambiguous, and your employee “in the subject line” can easily replace it with “remove the tire from the wheel”, “remove the tire from the disk”, etc. ... It is clear that the agency will not understand the specific topics, much less in IT terminology - all the same, you yourself will occupy keywords. In addition, you can easily monitor both employees and budget. Do not be afraid of the difficulties of learning - with the help of sites and teaching webinars, in two months, all the necessary fundamentals are comprehended, in four - subtleties, then - jewelry jewelry professionalism increases.

Think like a consumer. Imagine that a person wants to change tires for winter tires. What will he score in a search engine? Rather, something like "change wheels" or "put winter tires" than "skortirovat wheels." Do not complicate your keywords - if the client is looking for something, he most often searches in human language and sometimes makes abstract queries that describe the object of the search, rather than designating it for sure.

At least in the first stage, abandon the budget planning online advertising. If you are a business owner and you are not stifled by a hundred shareholders and five executives, start working with the budget, and then plan it based on the obtained real data. Plans made by Google, Yandex, and even an advertising agency lie in both directions and practically do not coincide with reality.

Do not neglect the image in the network. Online advertising may not bring tangible conversions or money, obviously coming from ads, but it makes your brand recognizable. Get at least advertising banners of the KMC campaigns Google - your banners flash, the product name is lit, users have associations of the product with your brand. Even if you just give text advertising, it inevitably affects the growth of search, and it is precisely for branded queries.

Combine Direct and AdWords sites to cover more potential customers. Choose the site you need to expand with in-depth analysis of real data.

Use Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics. These systems, even with basic use (without screwing up interesting functionality through an API), provide irreplaceable knowledge about your site, and it’s best to use them in combination. Of course, there are discrepancies in the data associated, for example, with methods of calculating certain indicators, but in general, there is always an exact trend. The data obtained from these free web-analyst, with proper interpretation, will allow you to open incredible horizons for working with the site, customers and so on ...

Trust the Yandex.Direct and AdWords Help - these are the most comprehensive and relevant materials for learning and clarifying controversial issues.

Each business chooses its own set of "chips" and tools to promote the product - these are different channels online and offline, with different efficiency and different costs. If you are limited in budget or simply do not want to throw money into nowhere, I can give a short piece of advice that works: collect information, analyze information, draw conclusions, find problems, implement solutions. Do all this in a cycle - time changes, customers change, you should be at the center of these changes. A positive result will be a good reward for your attention to web-analytics and online advertising management.