Testing the effectiveness of contextual advertising of a single site
Sites that I develop and support are practically all non-commercial and fairly narrowly focused. They do not pursue the goal of making money, including through advertising. However, they themselves are sometimes advertised. There is, of course, no desire to achieve rabid numbers of attendance: firstly, the budget is minimal and rather test, and secondly, the main flows of visitors go as referrals from other sites. That is, advertising here is taken as an additional tool, nothing more. And they decided to just check what sense we will have of contextual advertising.
In particular, for four months (long but very slowly), we tested the possibility of advertising one of the sites in Yandex.Direct , Google AdWords and VKontakte (from the beginning of December 2008 to March 2009). The choice of contextual advertising systems was limited by the available funds (all investments are the creators of a project that does not aim at making money) and the availability of certain means of payment (there is no American credit card :).
The most effective advertising platform in the long term (in terms of price / quality ratio) turned out to be Yandex.Direct, the most expensive (but effective!) Google AdWords, the most controversial in its results is VKontakte.
')
The experience with Google turned out to be the shortest: he quickly ate all the money (which he also had to transfer through Sberbank, because he hadn’t accepted Yandex.Money yet, but didn’t want to eat the existing credit card ..), did not choke and demanded an increase.
On the other hand, there was no attempt to make a long campaign - just a trial of opportunity. Quickly came to the conclusion: the most effective in terms of the number of users who passed to the site, but also the most expensive per visitor .
An attempt to use VKontakte resources was soon after the launch of the ad system there. Therefore, on the one hand, it was necessary to constantly resent the unintelligible interface, on the other hand, to correspond with Yandex.Money, because the payment on VKontakte did not pass. It turned out that the problem was on the side of VKontakte, which automatically generates all the details and does not even allow them to be manually copied and pasted somewhere. By evening, everything was already working, and payment - finally - was over.
At first, an advertising campaign was launched on literally several thousand people of the target audience. And she worked perfectly, attracting people to the group (for they don’t give advertising to the site itself). Further, the system was expanded and already covered the majority of graduates and students of specialized universities and (to a lesser extent) secondary specialized institutions - of those that are represented in this social network.
The conclusion turned out to be ambivalent: in principle, a certain number of people are more effective in attracting regular invitations to the group. Is free. A minus - not everyone reads these invitations (personally, I look through them to the maximum when I accumulate quite a lot. And delete them). But the number of transitions to the site itself is small. In fact, the cost of switching to the site from VKontakte (counting the losses - that is, just going to the group) is no less than the pre-crisis Yandex.Direct and is rather close to Google AdWords . Despite the cheapest price per click and the lack of sanctions for a very low CTR.
The fact is that ads are shown on multiple pages, and not all of them see them. Especially now, when they become familiar. If you scroll through the photo album, you see a lot of ads. Literally on every page with a photo - and as a result, you simply cannot physically look at them. Hence the low CTR . On the other hand, the clicks at first often went out of pure interest. I, too, can sometimes click on a funny ad or just a little weird, even if in no way it can interest me.
In the end, it was decided to cover this campaign for inefficiency : expensive and stupid. People are too tight for ads, but they implicitly treat it as spam. Now, if they saw the same thing in the tape of friends (that is, one of the friends joined the right group), then the chances of an adequate interest attitude are incomparably higher. It is easier to invite to the group personally (for a specific audience it is quite possible).
It turned out to be the best solution in our case. Firstly, the opportunity to get the most out of the advertising campaign, even if not being a professional in the field of advertising: correctly working auto-updates, once can set the best parameters for the campaign themselves. I used this opportunity, and as a result I did not agree with all the options (they were certainly more effective, but not always honest, they tortured my conscience ...), but I used almost all the achievements. True, the more effective ad became another, created and positioned after studying the weekly results of the first (as a result there are two different ads in the advertising campaign).
Secondly, the rather reasonable cost of clicks. It “settled down”, however, only after the removal by trial and error (manually and automatically) of unsuccessful keywords.
Finally, stability: the flow of visitors from Yandex.Direct is constant, predictable and fairly inexpensive.
Plus, of course, there are very nice statistics (Yandex.Metrica) :-)
Use contextual advertising can and should be almost everything. But its effectiveness is still very dependent on the budget and on the specific target audience. In our case, there were two options: to go for a narrow professional audience (which was done because of small funds) or try to reach the audience wider (because there are quite a lot of people outside the narrow caste of professionals among site visitors who came in by other means), but to accept with the fact that there will be a lot of volleys from the gun on the sparrows. In fact, the most effective option for us in the current situation is banner advertising. But the problem with it is rather that there are no other Russian-language sites of the relevant subject, people from whom were not attracted by other means (i.e., free of charge and along the chain of acquaintances). And in English-speaking people they did not climb for financial reasons (for example, we would most likely have received good results from Last.fm).
The advantage of Yandex.Direct is most likely due to the specifics of its context: not according to the context of the site, but according to the context of the latest search queries. In our case, this turned out to be somewhat more important due to the binding to the interests of the user rather than to his immediate immediate needs.
UPD by comments :
the average cost of a click on the poison was 16 cents, on individual ads - from 3 cents to 19 (it was unsuccessful, though ...). In the process, it gradually went down (while unsuccessful keywords were removed, and so on)
conversion was considered only in transitions, because everything else is extremely difficult to consider (there is no registration, activity — listening to audio — may well be limited to a few pages, because the information is presented immediately in open form). That is, depending on the pages, 2x is enough, and even one main one (if a person then goes, for example, to YouTube, to Scribd or Last.fm, or simply contacts by mail or offline, or he simply returned to it again to listen).
On average, the number of views is 2.8 (visitors for advertising), 5-10 (manual invitation through forums / VKontakte, etc. - that is, not through impersonal advertising), well, 1-2 for random visitors (who came on " left "keywords from search engines).
Due to the specifics of the site - 5-6 pages per visit can be considered already very large. It would be good to consider the time spent on the site (this is very significant in our case), but after checking it was decided to score on this parameter: the weather on Mars is considered. Not always, but in most cases.
In particular, for four months (long but very slowly), we tested the possibility of advertising one of the sites in Yandex.Direct , Google AdWords and VKontakte (from the beginning of December 2008 to March 2009). The choice of contextual advertising systems was limited by the available funds (all investments are the creators of a project that does not aim at making money) and the availability of certain means of payment (there is no American credit card :).
The most effective advertising platform in the long term (in terms of price / quality ratio) turned out to be Yandex.Direct, the most expensive (but effective!) Google AdWords, the most controversial in its results is VKontakte.
')
Google adwords
The experience with Google turned out to be the shortest: he quickly ate all the money (which he also had to transfer through Sberbank, because he hadn’t accepted Yandex.Money yet, but didn’t want to eat the existing credit card ..), did not choke and demanded an increase.
On the other hand, there was no attempt to make a long campaign - just a trial of opportunity. Quickly came to the conclusion: the most effective in terms of the number of users who passed to the site, but also the most expensive per visitor .
In contact with
An attempt to use VKontakte resources was soon after the launch of the ad system there. Therefore, on the one hand, it was necessary to constantly resent the unintelligible interface, on the other hand, to correspond with Yandex.Money, because the payment on VKontakte did not pass. It turned out that the problem was on the side of VKontakte, which automatically generates all the details and does not even allow them to be manually copied and pasted somewhere. By evening, everything was already working, and payment - finally - was over.
At first, an advertising campaign was launched on literally several thousand people of the target audience. And she worked perfectly, attracting people to the group (for they don’t give advertising to the site itself). Further, the system was expanded and already covered the majority of graduates and students of specialized universities and (to a lesser extent) secondary specialized institutions - of those that are represented in this social network.
The conclusion turned out to be ambivalent: in principle, a certain number of people are more effective in attracting regular invitations to the group. Is free. A minus - not everyone reads these invitations (personally, I look through them to the maximum when I accumulate quite a lot. And delete them). But the number of transitions to the site itself is small. In fact, the cost of switching to the site from VKontakte (counting the losses - that is, just going to the group) is no less than the pre-crisis Yandex.Direct and is rather close to Google AdWords . Despite the cheapest price per click and the lack of sanctions for a very low CTR.
The fact is that ads are shown on multiple pages, and not all of them see them. Especially now, when they become familiar. If you scroll through the photo album, you see a lot of ads. Literally on every page with a photo - and as a result, you simply cannot physically look at them. Hence the low CTR . On the other hand, the clicks at first often went out of pure interest. I, too, can sometimes click on a funny ad or just a little weird, even if in no way it can interest me.
In the end, it was decided to cover this campaign for inefficiency : expensive and stupid. People are too tight for ads, but they implicitly treat it as spam. Now, if they saw the same thing in the tape of friends (that is, one of the friends joined the right group), then the chances of an adequate interest attitude are incomparably higher. It is easier to invite to the group personally (for a specific audience it is quite possible).
Yandex.Direct
It turned out to be the best solution in our case. Firstly, the opportunity to get the most out of the advertising campaign, even if not being a professional in the field of advertising: correctly working auto-updates, once can set the best parameters for the campaign themselves. I used this opportunity, and as a result I did not agree with all the options (they were certainly more effective, but not always honest, they tortured my conscience ...), but I used almost all the achievements. True, the more effective ad became another, created and positioned after studying the weekly results of the first (as a result there are two different ads in the advertising campaign).
Secondly, the rather reasonable cost of clicks. It “settled down”, however, only after the removal by trial and error (manually and automatically) of unsuccessful keywords.
Finally, stability: the flow of visitors from Yandex.Direct is constant, predictable and fairly inexpensive.
Plus, of course, there are very nice statistics (Yandex.Metrica) :-)
... a little to the side
Use contextual advertising can and should be almost everything. But its effectiveness is still very dependent on the budget and on the specific target audience. In our case, there were two options: to go for a narrow professional audience (which was done because of small funds) or try to reach the audience wider (because there are quite a lot of people outside the narrow caste of professionals among site visitors who came in by other means), but to accept with the fact that there will be a lot of volleys from the gun on the sparrows. In fact, the most effective option for us in the current situation is banner advertising. But the problem with it is rather that there are no other Russian-language sites of the relevant subject, people from whom were not attracted by other means (i.e., free of charge and along the chain of acquaintances). And in English-speaking people they did not climb for financial reasons (for example, we would most likely have received good results from Last.fm).
The advantage of Yandex.Direct is most likely due to the specifics of its context: not according to the context of the site, but according to the context of the latest search queries. In our case, this turned out to be somewhat more important due to the binding to the interests of the user rather than to his immediate immediate needs.
UPD by comments :
the average cost of a click on the poison was 16 cents, on individual ads - from 3 cents to 19 (it was unsuccessful, though ...). In the process, it gradually went down (while unsuccessful keywords were removed, and so on)
conversion was considered only in transitions, because everything else is extremely difficult to consider (there is no registration, activity — listening to audio — may well be limited to a few pages, because the information is presented immediately in open form). That is, depending on the pages, 2x is enough, and even one main one (if a person then goes, for example, to YouTube, to Scribd or Last.fm, or simply contacts by mail or offline, or he simply returned to it again to listen).
On average, the number of views is 2.8 (visitors for advertising), 5-10 (manual invitation through forums / VKontakte, etc. - that is, not through impersonal advertising), well, 1-2 for random visitors (who came on " left "keywords from search engines).
Due to the specifics of the site - 5-6 pages per visit can be considered already very large. It would be good to consider the time spent on the site (this is very significant in our case), but after checking it was decided to score on this parameter: the weather on Mars is considered. Not always, but in most cases.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/57037/
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