Yandex Audiences: Cheap Direct

Let's try to figure out why this tool is a real breakthrough in Internet marketing in general and contextual advertising in particular

Having appeared in the summer of 2016, the Yandex.Audience service immediately became the main news for Internet marketers and everyone who is developing their business. Let's try to figure out why this tool is a real breakthrough in Internet marketing in general and contextual advertising in particular. 

What is this and why? 

How does contextual advertising usually work? There were four options:

• The user enters a search query, and he is shown a Yandex.Direct advertisement over the organic search results
• The user enters a search query, and then (within a month) he is “caught up” by an advertisement in YAN on thousands of Yandex partner sites
• The user is shown "contextual" ads when he is on a site containing certain keywords
• The user has already visited your site once, and then the advertisement in YAN “catches up” with him. 

Now a fifth is added to these four methods: advertising through Yandex.Audience. 

This service allows you to upload an e-mail and phone database to your Yandex.Direct advertising account. It can be the data of your customers, or it can be the data of your competitors - technically there is no difference. 

The database can be downloaded in encrypted (hashed) form, therefore, if your advertisement is managed by an agency, you You can not be afraid for data leakage! 

What happens next? Very simple. Yandex has a huge, gigantic database of information about all Internet users. If you once used your mail for registration, registered a Vkontakte account on a mobile phone number, and so on - Yandex remembers you. Therefore, downloading the database of e-mails and phones to Yandex Audience, you give a direct instruction to Yandex: “Show my ads to these people!”. 

Of course, not every phone or e-mail uniquely identifies a customer. Therefore, the usually loaded database is less than the original list by one and a half times. 

It's interesting that Yandex Audience coverage can be greater than the original database size: for example, with the same phone user accounts are connected on both laptop and tablet! 

How to set up Yandex Audiences

To use the Yandex service The audience in your business, you need to complete A few simple steps:

• Prepare the database of emails or phones
• Log in to your Yandex.Direct account and open the link audience.yandex.ru
• Download the database and wait from 30 minutes to several hours
• Create an ad in the advertising campaign for YAN, indicating the assembled audience as a condition for the ad to be displayed. 

You can load the database in TXT (each record from a new line) or CSV. Phones must be in the "79XXXXXXX" format without spaces, brackets or hyphens, and e-mail addresses must be written in lowercase letters. Yandex will ignore incorrect entries. 

In addition to showing ads to selected users, the collected audiences can be used as conditions for raising or lowering rates in existing Yandex.Direct campaigns (both YAN and search). 

Vkontakte retarget killer

Previously, a similar problem was solved using social networks. For example, Vkontakte could download the database of phones and display targeted advertising only to these users. But, firstly, not every business clients are active users of a particular social network; secondly, Vkontakte is only one of hundreds of thousands of sites of the Yandex Advertising Network. The reach of retargeting, which is done using Yandex Audiences, is orders of magnitude greater than Vkontakte! This means more traffic and less cost per click. 

Together with milder moderation, this practically kills the VKontakte retargeting tool, leaving it only for advertising groups and targeting active users through services like Cerebro. 

Big Data - for everyone! 

More recently, Big Data was something very ghostly, distant and accessible only to giant companies. Now everyone can use statistics from search engines (and this is truly a universal scale of data volumes!)

To do this, Yandex Audiences has a feature called “matching similar segments”. The essence of her work is that, based on the downloaded database, Yandex, using its statistics, selects a user database that looks like representatives of a downloaded database. This is done by analyzing the sex, age, geography of users, their behavior on the Internet, statistics of the sites they visit. 

The algorithm for selecting Yandex was not disclosed. There are several selection modes: from maximum accuracy to maximum coverage. That is, you can find or not very many people who are as close as possible in their parameters to the source database, but you can find a lot of those who are similar at least approximately. However, the phrase "not very much" is hardly suitable here: out of 1000 loaded, a database of half a million users is easily obtained. 

What will happen next? 

The main forecast that can be made is a sharp increase demand for purchased e-mail and phone databases. Previously, almost the only ways to use them were targeting on social networks (with not so much coverage and a fairly high price) and spam in e-mail newsletters (which is not so effective, dangerous and badly affects the image of the company) . Now, the business has at its disposal a cheap, efficient, legal and "intelligent" way to use the base taika. 

It is worth assuming that a variety of online store bases will be in the greatest demand. In some subjects, competitors can arrange a real "hunt" for each other's customer bases. A list of 50,000 phones is not easy to ring manually, and Yandex Audiences can reach all of these people and bring you to your site within one business day. 

We summarize. The new tool is extremely powerful, especially with the selection of similar segments through Big Data. Do not waste a day to start using Audiences on your own or to order a well-developed campaign in our agency.