Promotion in social networks. Part 1 - VKontakte and how is everything here?
As a rule, references to Vkontakte advertising opportunities in the Habr expanses are connected with cheerful and sometimes very lucrative bugs (for example, here you can read about how VC allowed users to unscrew free advertising with pay per click; this bug, by the way, to the end and not fixed).
Often, many programmers appear in the comments on publications with the “revelations” of creepy smmschikov who take fabulous money for setting up advertising, without giving any guarantees. For example, in this publication, which has become the main message for writing this cycle, the respected Drizzly states that:
Being a person who sells targeting settings and promotion services like on Vkontakte, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and a little bit of SEO, I completely agree with him. Moreover, I am sure that this occupation is available to absolutely anyone who has at least small analytical skills. And if you have them (since you are reading Habr, you are most likely), welcome under the cat. Perhaps one day you will have to place ads on social networks yourself, or at least assess the adequacy of the work of someone who asks you for money for this setting. And I sincerely hope that this series of publications will be useful to you. So let's go!
Despite all my desire and impulses, I realized that it is impossible to shove 5 years of experience in one publication, therefore, in order to protect myself from many hours of longrids, I tried to divide the cycle into several logically completed blocks, in the first of which I will talk about the device VK office account, ad features and pricing.
')
As I mentioned above, the impetus for writing this article was this publication on Habré. Rather, it’s not even the publication itself, but the fact that more than 5 years have passed since its release, and many cliches have been sitting in the old place.
For example, the author claims that
All of the above is complete nonsense. Before moving on, I would like to point out that very often it is NECESSARY to make a bid BELOW recommended. Moreover, on VKontakte, it is MUCH profitable to use pay per impressions (cpm), and not per click (cpc). And of course, the more accurately you set up advertising, the cheaper and more effective it will be.
Before moving on, I offer you a small dose of educational program:
In order to get into the advertising office (if you have never done this before), you need to go to vk.com/ads
I don’t understand why VC threw in so many extra buttons here, by and large, to work, you will need Targeted ads and Advertisements in the communities (if you want to buy promotional posts in other communities through the VC exchange). As a rule, tattered ads are much more effective compared to the placement of advertisements, so in this opus we will focus on them.
Contact offers to advertise the Community, Record in the Community, Vkontakte Application, Video Recording, Mobile Application or External Website . Frankly, for many years of work, I got the impression that if you drop the VC Application, Video Recording and Mobile Application options from this list, nothing will change.
As you may have guessed, we will focus on the tabs Community, Community Record and External site. There is no difference in VKontakte, you merge traffic on the internal VK pages, or an external site, there are no particular pricing options, but some additional advertising formats are available for communities.
If we are going to promote a community, you must select it from the list of communities to which we are subscribed, and decide on the format of the advertisement.
Due to the fact that VC will soon release a new redesign, the requirements for the pictures have changed a bit, however, all other settings remain the same.
For communities, VK offers 5 ad options:
Thesis about each format:
Image and text are generally ineffective. Despite the additional space under the text, surrounded by large images, this format loses in most cases.
Large Image - one of the most current formats. These are the side rectangles that appear in the left column of contact users, ignoring the appearance of plug-ins, like Adblock. Life hacking! Very often, question headers are much more clickable than statements. In addition, it is sometimes great to add a small bright strip to the bottom of the picture along with a short explanation / question / appeal. This combination will be much more efficient format image and text.
Exclusive format - it will soon cease to exist. And not for nothing. Considering that the cost of advertising is 2 times higher, it is almost always impractical to use such a format. There are exceptions, but rarely. Very rarely.
Promotion of communities - 25 characters in the title are loaded from the description of your community. The Subscribe button under the picture could give additional conversions. But does not. Again, Large Image is often more efficient. Life hacking! The only way to change the title of the title in this format is to change the name of the public at the time of the launch of the advertisement. After sending for moderation, the name of the public can be returned.
Special format - for him fair life hacking from the previous section. Unlike all previous formats, the special format does not fall into the sidebar, but directly into the user's tape in the Recommended Communities section.
This format has MUCH a higher recommended rate and final price, but the ratio of people who click and enter the community is usually much higher than in competitive formats. At the same time, such ads are unscrewed much slower, therefore, when promoting communities, I, as a rule, use a bunch of Large images and special format.
And finally we got to the key settings - the settings of the target audience.
It should be noted that a different audience has its price depending on the level of competition. So, for example, girls of 22-30 years old will cost much more than girls under 18 because of solvency, level of income, lifestyle and many other factors. At the same time, much more advertising is pouring on the average resident of Moscow than on the conditional Vasya from a small Siberian village.
And this means that when specifying the target audience, it is necessary to strictly segment this very audience according to geo-gender features. It makes sense to duplicate the ad for each segment, even if you set up advertising on all residents of the country with any age. At a minimum, it is necessary to allocate the residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg into a separate group (since the recommended rate for the residents of these cities is much higher), while dividing the audience by the female and male sex. The rest of the ads show everyone, except for residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, also divided by gender.
If you want to save even more, it is definitely worth adding a breakdown by age group. An ad with the same picture and title can have more than 10 different geo-gender-age groups: women from 18 to 24 from Sochi, women from 24 to 28 from Sochi, men from 18 to 24 from blablabla and etc. Thus, you can select the most optimal rate for each audience segment, while saving the lion's share of the budget.
This is followed by a block with the settings of interests. The Interests item is what the user specifies in his profile. Item Categories of Interests - this is what the user defines the Contact, depending on his behavior. Grandfather always told me: “Always judge people by deeds, not words.” This principle should be applied here. User interests do not carry any value to the advertiser, as they often do not reflect reality. At the same time, interest categories can sometimes produce a very interesting exhaust. However, these fields can be left blank.
VC gives us the opportunity to indicate the communities to which our target audience is subscribed, as well as the applications that are installed. The more accurately you can determine the client's portrait, the more effective your advertising will be.
Item Worldview carries absolutely no value, ignore it.
Checkbox with Travelers will help to gather people logging in from different countries. Or using VPN.
The Education and Work Section can sometimes be helpful (when it comes to education). However, you should always take into account the fact that many users often fill in these fields are not quite adequate.
Additional parameters contain information about retargeting groups, devices from which the user logs in and browsers. With the last two everything is clear (sometimes you can pour ads on iPhone users with the hypothesis that they are more solvent, although this is not always true), but if I start to describe in detail about the bases of retargeting, this post will never end. Therefore, in more detail about all the features of retarget we will talk in the following publications, but for now - the final sketch: the rate.
Probably, in 90 percent of cases, it is much more profitable to use the system of payment for SHOWS, and not clicks. With a properly selected audience, this approach gives a much higher result. For example, for my current task, VK offers to pay 38 rubles per click, while paying for shows, the final cost of a click is 4-5 rubles.
When using a special format (the one that goes to the user to the tape), it makes sense to put the recommended price, since the ads are unscrewed rather slowly and reluctantly. At the same time, on the other formats, it makes sense to put a much lower price, gradually raising it, as the ratio of impressions and coverage decreases. So, with the recommended price of 10 rubles per 1000 impressions, you can have quite a few cheap clicks and at a price of 1-2 rubles. At a time when the cost begins to rise, the price can be gradually increased, while maintaining the growth of coverage. This is perhaps the most difficult moment that comes with experience, but the key message is that in most cases, it is worthwhile to place a lower rate than the system recommends.
In addition, there are several interesting programs for automatic rate control using algorithms based on neural networks, but this is also another time.
Tick ​​Limit to 100 impressions per person is always checked.
Let me remind you that all this time it was about promoting communities. Website advertising is no different from these settings, except that the special format and the promotion of communities is not available for the site. I will also tell you about the promotion of posts.
I will be glad to any criticism and comments. If you think that further publications on this topic would be to your liking, please let us know. If you think that there is not - in any case, be sure to let me know! =)
And also, if you are suddenly interested in marketing, and you don’t mind occasionally receiving small notes on Internet promotion, including white / gray, and sometimes black methods (very rarely and few), as well as all sorts of “memoirs” on promoting projects on Kickstarter, or earning a couple thousand for a night on shooting posts with reddit.com - I just podsuetils and created a cozy tube channel in telegrams , which is now only 2 users, but no, and there will never be any bad advertising. You can subscribe and be well done, but you can not subscribe, cast a minus in karma for NOT imposing, but advertising, and also be good.
Well, now, it remains only to wish you a good day, and go to sleep. 4:06 am in the yard.
Often, many programmers appear in the comments on publications with the “revelations” of creepy smmschikov who take fabulous money for setting up advertising, without giving any guarantees. For example, in this publication, which has become the main message for writing this cycle, the respected Drizzly states that:
It is very illogical to target targeting to sell for an extra price. On the contrary, advertisers should be motivated to use geo and social targeting tools as much as possible and target their ads to Central Asia as accurately as possible. In this case, all three parties win - advertising has higher conversion, the site has more free space, less relocations spread by subject, higher CTR, the user receives advertising relevant to his interest. Selling targeting settings is insane .
Being a person who sells targeting settings and promotion services like on Vkontakte, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and a little bit of SEO, I completely agree with him. Moreover, I am sure that this occupation is available to absolutely anyone who has at least small analytical skills. And if you have them (since you are reading Habr, you are most likely), welcome under the cat. Perhaps one day you will have to place ads on social networks yourself, or at least assess the adequacy of the work of someone who asks you for money for this setting. And I sincerely hope that this series of publications will be useful to you. So let's go!
Despite all my desire and impulses, I realized that it is impossible to shove 5 years of experience in one publication, therefore, in order to protect myself from many hours of longrids, I tried to divide the cycle into several logically completed blocks, in the first of which I will talk about the device VK office account, ad features and pricing.
')
As I mentioned above, the impetus for writing this article was this publication on Habré. Rather, it’s not even the publication itself, but the fact that more than 5 years have passed since its release, and many cliches have been sitting in the old place.
For example, the author claims that
The more targeting settings you apply, the more expensive the click becomes; Despite the low minimum CPC for the entire system, the price is always recommended several times higher. There is no point in making a bet lower than recommended - there will be no hits at all. In addition, the recommended price tends to increase as the campaign progresses.
All of the above is complete nonsense. Before moving on, I would like to point out that very often it is NECESSARY to make a bid BELOW recommended. Moreover, on VKontakte, it is MUCH profitable to use pay per impressions (cpm), and not per click (cpc). And of course, the more accurately you set up advertising, the cheaper and more effective it will be.
Before moving on, I offer you a small dose of educational program:
- Targeted advertising is a Contact feature that allows you to create text-and-text ads for displaying a pre-selected target audience (from the target English - target, target).
- The success of an advertising campaign depends on 3 main factors: a well-chosen target audience, a well-prepared platform (whether it is a community in the VC, an external site, an application or a video) and an effective ad.
- In order to qualitatively select the target audience, it is necessary to make the most detailed portrait of the client.
Who is he? How old is he or she? Where dwells? What are his hobbies? What communities can it subscribe to?
The more accurate your portrait is, the easier it will be to hook on the desired client with the help of an advertisement and a platform. - Segment your target audience. Very often, it makes sense to make different announcements for different groups, sometimes new landing pages are created for a specific group. The more competent you approach the process of selecting the target audience, the more successful your project will be. And it is not only about advertising in the VC.
In order to get into the advertising office (if you have never done this before), you need to go to vk.com/ads
I don’t understand why VC threw in so many extra buttons here, by and large, to work, you will need Targeted ads and Advertisements in the communities (if you want to buy promotional posts in other communities through the VC exchange). As a rule, tattered ads are much more effective compared to the placement of advertisements, so in this opus we will focus on them.
Contact offers to advertise the Community, Record in the Community, Vkontakte Application, Video Recording, Mobile Application or External Website . Frankly, for many years of work, I got the impression that if you drop the VC Application, Video Recording and Mobile Application options from this list, nothing will change.
As you may have guessed, we will focus on the tabs Community, Community Record and External site. There is no difference in VKontakte, you merge traffic on the internal VK pages, or an external site, there are no particular pricing options, but some additional advertising formats are available for communities.
If we are going to promote a community, you must select it from the list of communities to which we are subscribed, and decide on the format of the advertisement.
Due to the fact that VC will soon release a new redesign, the requirements for the pictures have changed a bit, however, all other settings remain the same.
For communities, VK offers 5 ad options:
- The image and text are 25 characters in the title, the picture is 180 by 130, 60 in the description below the picture.
- Large image - 25 characters in the title, the picture is 180 by 240.
- The exclusive format is 25 characters in the title, the picture is 90 by 160 (when the redesign is rolled out for everyone, this format will disappear).
- Promotion of communities - 25 characters in the title, a picture 180 by 180
- Special - picture 256 to 256, and the FIG knows how many characters are in the description.
Thesis about each format:
Image and text are generally ineffective. Despite the additional space under the text, surrounded by large images, this format loses in most cases.
Large Image - one of the most current formats. These are the side rectangles that appear in the left column of contact users, ignoring the appearance of plug-ins, like Adblock. Life hacking! Very often, question headers are much more clickable than statements. In addition, it is sometimes great to add a small bright strip to the bottom of the picture along with a short explanation / question / appeal. This combination will be much more efficient format image and text.
Exclusive format - it will soon cease to exist. And not for nothing. Considering that the cost of advertising is 2 times higher, it is almost always impractical to use such a format. There are exceptions, but rarely. Very rarely.
Promotion of communities - 25 characters in the title are loaded from the description of your community. The Subscribe button under the picture could give additional conversions. But does not. Again, Large Image is often more efficient. Life hacking! The only way to change the title of the title in this format is to change the name of the public at the time of the launch of the advertisement. After sending for moderation, the name of the public can be returned.
Special format - for him fair life hacking from the previous section. Unlike all previous formats, the special format does not fall into the sidebar, but directly into the user's tape in the Recommended Communities section.
This format has MUCH a higher recommended rate and final price, but the ratio of people who click and enter the community is usually much higher than in competitive formats. At the same time, such ads are unscrewed much slower, therefore, when promoting communities, I, as a rule, use a bunch of Large images and special format.
And finally we got to the key settings - the settings of the target audience.
It should be noted that a different audience has its price depending on the level of competition. So, for example, girls of 22-30 years old will cost much more than girls under 18 because of solvency, level of income, lifestyle and many other factors. At the same time, much more advertising is pouring on the average resident of Moscow than on the conditional Vasya from a small Siberian village.
And this means that when specifying the target audience, it is necessary to strictly segment this very audience according to geo-gender features. It makes sense to duplicate the ad for each segment, even if you set up advertising on all residents of the country with any age. At a minimum, it is necessary to allocate the residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg into a separate group (since the recommended rate for the residents of these cities is much higher), while dividing the audience by the female and male sex. The rest of the ads show everyone, except for residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, also divided by gender.
If you want to save even more, it is definitely worth adding a breakdown by age group. An ad with the same picture and title can have more than 10 different geo-gender-age groups: women from 18 to 24 from Sochi, women from 24 to 28 from Sochi, men from 18 to 24 from blablabla and etc. Thus, you can select the most optimal rate for each audience segment, while saving the lion's share of the budget.
This is followed by a block with the settings of interests. The Interests item is what the user specifies in his profile. Item Categories of Interests - this is what the user defines the Contact, depending on his behavior. Grandfather always told me: “Always judge people by deeds, not words.” This principle should be applied here. User interests do not carry any value to the advertiser, as they often do not reflect reality. At the same time, interest categories can sometimes produce a very interesting exhaust. However, these fields can be left blank.
VC gives us the opportunity to indicate the communities to which our target audience is subscribed, as well as the applications that are installed. The more accurately you can determine the client's portrait, the more effective your advertising will be.
Item Worldview carries absolutely no value, ignore it.
Checkbox with Travelers will help to gather people logging in from different countries. Or using VPN.
The Education and Work Section can sometimes be helpful (when it comes to education). However, you should always take into account the fact that many users often fill in these fields are not quite adequate.
Additional parameters contain information about retargeting groups, devices from which the user logs in and browsers. With the last two everything is clear (sometimes you can pour ads on iPhone users with the hypothesis that they are more solvent, although this is not always true), but if I start to describe in detail about the bases of retargeting, this post will never end. Therefore, in more detail about all the features of retarget we will talk in the following publications, but for now - the final sketch: the rate.
Probably, in 90 percent of cases, it is much more profitable to use the system of payment for SHOWS, and not clicks. With a properly selected audience, this approach gives a much higher result. For example, for my current task, VK offers to pay 38 rubles per click, while paying for shows, the final cost of a click is 4-5 rubles.
When using a special format (the one that goes to the user to the tape), it makes sense to put the recommended price, since the ads are unscrewed rather slowly and reluctantly. At the same time, on the other formats, it makes sense to put a much lower price, gradually raising it, as the ratio of impressions and coverage decreases. So, with the recommended price of 10 rubles per 1000 impressions, you can have quite a few cheap clicks and at a price of 1-2 rubles. At a time when the cost begins to rise, the price can be gradually increased, while maintaining the growth of coverage. This is perhaps the most difficult moment that comes with experience, but the key message is that in most cases, it is worthwhile to place a lower rate than the system recommends.
In addition, there are several interesting programs for automatic rate control using algorithms based on neural networks, but this is also another time.
Tick ​​Limit to 100 impressions per person is always checked.
Let me remind you that all this time it was about promoting communities. Website advertising is no different from these settings, except that the special format and the promotion of communities is not available for the site. I will also tell you about the promotion of posts.
I will be glad to any criticism and comments. If you think that further publications on this topic would be to your liking, please let us know. If you think that there is not - in any case, be sure to let me know! =)
And also, if you are suddenly interested in marketing, and you don’t mind occasionally receiving small notes on Internet promotion, including white / gray, and sometimes black methods (very rarely and few), as well as all sorts of “memoirs” on promoting projects on Kickstarter, or earning a couple thousand for a night on shooting posts with reddit.com - I just podsuetils and created a cozy tube channel in telegrams , which is now only 2 users, but no, and there will never be any bad advertising. You can subscribe and be well done, but you can not subscribe, cast a minus in karma for NOT imposing, but advertising, and also be good.
Well, now, it remains only to wish you a good day, and go to sleep. 4:06 am in the yard.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/301538/
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