Perry Marshall, Brian Todd
Comprehensive Guide
Brad Geddes
What, where and when to do to get maximum effect
Dan Zarrella
This book first appeared in in electronic format at the end of 2011. Very quickly, examples and recommendations from it began to be distributed on the websites and blogs of specialists working with contextual advertising, and were also borrowed by other authors of books on Yandex.Direct. In 2014, at the request of readers, it was decided to release this book in paper form - and here it is in front of you.
Are you a business owner or work with affiliate programs? Then you are probably thinking about how to attract the maximum possible number of potential customers to your Internet resource with minimal costs and in the shortest possible time. And, accordingly, earn really big money by selling your goods or services.
Over the years professional activity I had to deal with a wide variety of types of promotion of services and goods on the Internet, ranging from banner advertising and ending with multi-level affiliate programs. Gradually I came to the conclusion: today there is nothing more effective contextual advertising. It is this that allows you to attract only those users who are interested in purchasing your product and save advertising budgets without wasting them on a “random” audience.
But working with contextual advertising has many pitfalls. And b O most of them are put in the way of illiterate advertisers by the largest Russian system contextual advertising Yandex.Direct. Ignorance of the nuances of working with this system is fraught with deep disappointment and financial losses. Imagine a situation where a multi-thousand dollar budget for advertising campaign at worst it was wasted, and at best it just paid for the advertising without any profit!
Moreover, problems often arise not only among novice Yandex.Direct users who are not familiar with the pricing system. Even “shot sparrows” sometimes come to despair, trying to understand where and what they made a mistake.
This book about the intricacies and secrets of working with the Yandex.Direct contextual advertising system was written for advertisers who are tired of dubious experiments. In fact, why rush headlong into the pool if you can increase the effectiveness of an advertising campaign without any risk?
On the pages of this book you will find a wide variety of practical solutions, which have been successfully used by the author in working with Yandex.Direct for many years and include many different techniques; by copying them, you can easily make your advertising campaign in Yandex.Direct as profitable as possible.
From the book you will learn:
How to attract maximum traffic at the lowest possible price;
How to reduce budgets significantly without compromising attendance;
How to give your ads the opportunity to take the most advantageous positions with a limited budget, etc.
What you will learn by reading this book:
Create ads with a high CTR (50% and above);
Get into special placements for 3 cents per click;
Conduct guerrilla warfare against competitors;
Collect tons of thematic traffic for 1 cent;
Identify key queries that do not bring you profit;
In two clicks, collect a semantic core consisting of many thousands of queries;
Create clickable ads that will be in demand among advertisers.
What problems can you solve after reading the book:
Budget overruns;
High cost per click in special placement and guarantees;
Competition that does not allow your business to develop;
Rising rates in the absence of competition;
Low effectiveness of ad texts and headlines.
This book will be useful for you if:
You need knowledge for subsequent installation on high paying job in the current specialty “contextual advertising manager”;
You are a business owner and want to use effective modern tools to attract potential customers to your website.
Introduction
Before starting this book, I would like to talk in a few words about how you should assimilate the material presented in it.
First of all, let's understand the terms that appear from the very first pages.
CTR(synonymous with “clickability”, from English. click-through rate - click-through rate) is defined as the ratio of clicks on a banner or advertisement to the number of impressions. Measured as a percentage.
CTR = (number of clicks / number of impressions) × 100
CTR is an important indicator of the effectiveness of any advertising campaign. It is applicable to any hypertext link on the Internet, if its impressions and clicks are taken into account (source of definition - Wikipedia).
Syntax Yandex.Direct– additional operators of the word selection form, with which you can clarify the queries you need (the source of the definition is the official Yandex.Direct help).
Traffic– a synonym for the word “attendance”. If the text says: “Traffic by specified requests exceeds the traffic for the main request by 5 times,” this means: “The traffic for the specified requests exceeds the traffic for the main request by 5 times.”
Keyward- the key phrase in the ad.
Relevance– compliance of the user’s request with the contextual ad shown to him.
These are the basic terms that appear most often in the book. All of them are explained on the Internet, where you can easily clarify the meaning of other words or phrases that you do not understand.
How to choose the right semantic core for an advertising campaign
Surely you are familiar with the situation when, in pursuit of the maximum amount of traffic, you have to sort through everything possible options keywords. The search, as a rule, uses not only standard, now familiar services, but also separate databases of keywords on a particular topic.
In this article you will learn all the known techniques on how to make an effective ad in Yandex.Direct, how to increase CTR, as well as a hacker way to analyze USP (Unique trade offers) competitors throughout Russia. A marketer shares his experience.
Relevance
This is consistent with the rule of 1 keyword = 1 title.
Let’s say a person is looking for “Repair of a one-room apartment price” - we show him the ad “Repair of a one-room apartment. Prices from...” What is the appeal of such an ad? Yandex highlights (highlights in bold) the key query in the title. The user clearly sees: “Oh, this is what I’m looking for.”
In addition, relevant ads “cost” less - the cost of clicking on them is lower from the very start.
Here are all the advantages:
- The person finds in the ad what he was looking for;
- The title is highlighted in bold and becomes much more noticeable;
- Lower cost per click from the very start;
- Increase in CTR and further reduction in cost per click.
Important point: Don’t chase double keyword matches in both the title and the text. A direct entry in the ad title is enough, and in the text - use useful place for benefits.
As in the example below, the text of the first ad contains one word “repair”, which is most typical for the topic.
Now about the impact of the inclusion of a keyword in an ad on CTR.
Yandex itself provides the following statistics on its blog:
Relevance also means working with deep semantics, down to micro-frequency queries.
In the example below, the second ad is more relevant. All other things being equal (excluding the title), its CTR will be higher:
Favicon
In war, all means are good. Favicon can help increase CTR in Yandex Direct.
To set an icon for ads, just add a file in .ico format to your website.
Note: Direct does not guarantee the display of the favicon (even if it is installed correctly).
In theory, an arrow-shaped favicon will work better than a regular icon. In practice, it seems almost impossible to compare the two options.
Service for creating icons: Favicon.ru.
Display link
Therefore, try to duplicate the key query in the displayed link.
The displayed link can be used in conjunction with templates (the keyword will be inserted into it). The place in the displayed link where you need to insert key phrases must be delimited on the right and left with a “#” sign.
For example - “#Repair-Apartment#”.
Quick links
Ideally, these are your benefits, and not just standard links like “Contacts” or “About Us”.
Yandex business card
It also makes the ad more noticeable and “on the shore” provides a telephone number to a potential buyer, informs you of your operating hours, and indicates the city (which is also very important).
An important point - previously there was a fashion for extended operating modes, but now this is relevant for Moscow and St. Petersburg. That is, if you are in Tomsk and indicated an extended operating mode, then Yandex will remove the city from the contact information and will only show the operating mode.
For St. Petersburg and Moscow, it is mandatory to indicate the metro station - this will allow you to occupy an additional line.
Clarifications
Clarifications are shown if the ad is in first place in the special placement block. Do not stand out as bold. Add visibility.
The length of the clarification must be no more than 25 characters, including spaces. One ad will display as many clarifications as can fit on one line (66 characters).
Part of the key query in the domain name
If the domain contains part of the request, then this part can be highlighted in bold - again a plus for visibility.
Important point: Yandex recognizes the Cyrillic alphabet well. There may be problems with Latin transcription.
Words in the domain must be hyphenated. The remontkvartir domain is less likely to be highlighted.
Rating on Yandex Market
First of all, it is relevant for online stores.
Rating in ads on Yandex Market is what you need to strive for. It will add one line to your ad, even if you are in third position in the special placement (or even under the search results, in the block of guaranteed impressions).
Yandex itself states that the click-through rate of ads with a rating is 1.5% higher.
Important point: if there are few stars (3 or less), this can, on the contrary, reduce the attractiveness of the ad and “drop” the CTR.
Compare these two options:
Adding functionality
Using filters in your ad text/headline can have a positive impact on budget savings. Let's consider 5 types of filters:
1) Price - everything is simple here. If a person has 1 million rubles, and you offer to buy him an apartment for 2 million, then he will not buy it. The price filter helps to filter out inappropriate audiences.
2) Quantity of goods - let's say you sell T-shirts wholesale. A person needs to buy 5 T-shirts, but you sell from 100 pieces.
3) GEO filter - you are engaged in renting out apartments in Moscow. Since residents of the region are potentially also your clients, it is not advisable to disable impressions for them.
Also, ads can be seen by people whose city is incorrectly determined by IP (this is not a rare situation, as it might seem). Then the city's direction will weed out uninterested people.
4) Ultra GEO filter - key query “private kindergarten in St. Petersburg”. Indicating the city in this case is absolutely logical, but that was not the case. The parent is most likely looking for a kindergarten that is close to his home or in his area.
Excursions can be for schoolchildren, young children, and adults. Indicating the potential audience or age range can help here.
You can also use filters like “owner, wholesaler, for legal entities, for individuals.”
Company name
The name of the company in the ad is a very unusual means.
- Officiality, much less risk of being deceived;
- Not a private owner, you can easily work under a contract;
- If the potential client is a legal entity, then this is not a problem for non-cash payment or provision of closing documents.
Extended header
According to Yandex, ads in which part of the text is inserted into the title have an average CTR of 2.5-3% higher.
The rules are simple: the title and the first part of the text must contain no more than 56 characters. Otherwise, the page address is substituted into the title.
Literacy
Ads compiled according to the rules of the Russian language have a higher CTR - which is logical. Therefore, modify the “crooked” keys in the headings into a human-understandable form.
For example, for “Apartment renovation in Novosibirsk” the CTR is 2-5% higher than for an ad like “Apartment renovation Novosibirsk”.
Numbers in text
Numbers attract people's attention. What are the options:
Indication of the price of the product can be used as “from 1000 rubles”. In this ad, the price tag is also a filter for cutting off non-target audiences who value it.
Warranty with duration:
Customer discount or savings percentage:
That is, not just “installation”, but “installation in 2 days”.
Not just a discount, but “up to 20% discount”.
Unique selling proposition
So we got to factor No. 1: how to increase CTR in Direct.
The USP is perhaps the most important part of the ad. This is what sets you apart from your competitors, and, accordingly:
- Increases CTR;
- Reduces the cost per click;
- Increases the conversion of landing page visitors into applications, calls, and orders.
Compare two sentences:
Option No. 1: Turnkey apartment renovation. Calling a specialist is free! Cheap! Promotion!
Option #2: Kitchen renovation as a gift! 5 year warranty! Agreement! Call!
Option 2 will be more clickable. And that's why.
The first one has no USP. Calling a specialist is free - everyone has it. Cheap doesn't mean anything. The action is the same.
The second option has a “Promotion” - a kitchen renovation as a gift. Much more noticeable.
The formation of a USP first begins with studying competitors and studying the target audience.
You can simply look at your competitors by looking at the ads in Direct.
There are three disadvantages to this:
- We will only cover our city - it’s not a fact that your city has strong competitors;
- It's difficult to come up with something unique;
- If you manually search for advertisements by region, it will take a long time.
There is a solution.
What to do:
1) Downloaded the database, unpacked it, installed a program to work with the database.
2) Launch the program and get down to business:
3) Go to “File” -> “Open database...” -> Find our file “YandexAds.db”, open it.
4) Go to the “Run SQL Code” tab.
Now we can run the code and make a selection. Code below:
SELECT * FROM ads WHERE ads MATCH "holidays*";
The sample results will include full advertisements, containing the words “holiday” and “festive” in different word forms.
SELECT * FROM ads WHERE ads MATCH "children* holidays*";
The sample results will contain full advertisements that simultaneously contain forms of the words “holiday” or “festive” in different forms and forms of the words “children” or “children’s”. By analogy, you can add more words or their forms to the query, for example, ... "children* holidays* sports*".
These two functions are enough for me. There's more on the site.
I want to make a selection for apartment renovations, then I introduce the function:
SELECT * FROM ads WHERE ads MATCH "rem* quart*";
We press the button.
Click the floppy disk icon and select the parameters that I indicated on the screenshot.
The only thing left to do is open the saved file with notepad or another text editor, save the file in .csv format with Unicode encoding - this is important.
Open the .csv file in Excel. Now we have a selection on the desired topic.
There are many duplicates in the table. You can do it in two ways:
1) Leave everything unchanged. Then you will have to spend too much time watching.
2) Remove duplicates from column B and column C (it happens that advertisements for the same domain contain useful information). Personally, I only delete duplicates in column B.
Select column B, go to Excel to “Data” -> “Remove duplicates”.
All that remains is to review the headlines and write down potentially valuable parts of the USP.
I spent about 20 minutes, did not look through the entire table, and received the following list:
Yes, there are dubious USPs, but there are also quite good ones - for example, “ Stretch ceiling as a gift / Apartment insurance as a gift.”
Based on this, you can create your proposal, and use some of the advantages for quick links and clarifications. And most importantly, you get an idea of what offers other companies have, and then associative ideas for your USP:
Vacuum cleaner as a gift -> Jacuzzi as a gift -> Shower cabin as a gift, etc.
Important point: information about benefits and advantages should be not only in the ad, but also on the landing page. Preferably on the first screen, in the title/subtitle.
Instead of a conclusion
What will work best will only be revealed by a test. If you still have any tricky tricks for increase CTR and creating an effective ad in Yandex Direct - share in the comments.
Yandex Direct advanced
The course program complies with the professional standard “Internet Marketing Specialist”.
Do you want to learn how to run advertising campaigns in Yandex.Direct as efficiently as possible? Is there a task to improve the attraction of the target audience? Are you looking to make the best use of your advertising budget? We will teach you how to solve these problems.
The amount of money spent on online advertising in 2018 was the first time in Russian history exceeded spending on television advertising. Budgets for online promotion are increasing by an average of 15% per year, and this trend continues to persist. This places increasing responsibility on specialists involved in online advertising; employers are placing ever-increasing demands on them in line with their budgets.
This course will be most useful to you if you already understand general principles conducting advertising campaigns in Yandex.Direct, but want to expand and deepen your knowledge, skills and abilities. During the classes you will learn how to manage your advertising budgets with maximum efficiency. One of the course modules will be devoted to auditing the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. After completing the training, you will be able to conduct detailed analysis campaigns you are running and find out the optimal ratio between the funds spent and the return on advertising.
You will learn how to optimize your cost per click, use special professional services estimate the cost of transition, learn to mark advertisements with UTM and yclid tags, develop a targeting strategy advertising impressions, master the effective expanded structure of your Yandex.Direct account.
A special educational block is devoted to the development of the most effective texts, increasing the CTP of ads, and the correct selection of keywords. Special time will be devoted to reports in Yandex.Direct and Yandex.Metrica, campaign management using Excel and Yandex.Commander.
Well intended for contextual advertising specialists, agency employees, marketers, private advertisers.
Learn from the best professional practitioners. Come to the "Specialist".
Dmitry Skalubo
This material will be useful to advertisers who use the Yandex Direct contextual advertising system and advertise on Yandex search. If you delegate advertising, you can check whether you are spending too much due to the contractor’s mistakes. If you manage it yourself, you will be able to find out whether you are using all the capabilities of Direct.
There is no universal recipe that will allow you to set up and run advertising on any topic. But the mistakes that almost every advertiser makes are repeated. Therefore, the main goal of the article is to introduce you to the main ways to save your advertising budget, thanks to a correct understanding of campaign settings and the basics of creating advertisements.
Errors when registering an account
The two most common are:
1. Registering an advertising account for a contractor without indicating in the contract who its owner is. A completely neglected case - there are no contracts, advertising is carried out by agreement with the contractor, who “will do everything himself, you don’t even have to register with Yandex Direct.”
Why is that bad?
In fact, by paying for the work of a contractor to set up advertising, you do not have full access to the tool in which it is run. If for some reason you have to part with the performer, you risk getting an exciting opportunity to start all over again.
Also, Yandex makes no secret of the fact that agencies receive commissions from funds spent on agent accounts. At the end of 2016, after deducting VAT, the amount was about 7% of the funds spent on the account. Guess how you can increase agency profits at your expense?
If the “Direct” and “Metrica” accounts are located on different logins, the contractor may forget to indicate the counter number in the campaign settings. This means it will be more difficult to find underperforming keywords and landing pages.
To be fair, I will say that many advertisers themselves treat advertising “carelessly,” thereby multiplying unscrupulous performers. What I remember most is the case when an advertisement that led to a specially created one-page website for real estate services was audited. It’s easy to track requests through the feedback form, but most of the requests came through the phone. The simplest and cheapest tracking solution would be to purchase a separate SIM card and replace the number on the one-page website. I can hardly forget the advertiser's answer - “We feel when advertising calls.”
How to avoid mistakes:
- In the case of working with a freelancer - advertising account must be registered to the advertiser.
- If you are working under an agreement with an agency/contractor, please clarify - in the event that cooperation is terminated, how all advertising campaigns, the setup and maintenance of which you paid for, will be transferred to you.
- Check whether Yandex Metrica and Yandex Direct are on the same account; if not, make sure that the Metrica counter is specified in the campaign settings.
Misunderstanding of what affects the cost per click
From Yandex help:
Click-through rate (CTR – Click-Through Rate)- the ratio of the number of clicks on an ad to the number of its impressions, measured as a percentage. We can say that this indicator determines the effectiveness of the ad. The higher the CTR, the more relevant the ad is to the request and the lower the cost of entry into guaranteed impressions or special placement will be for you.
- Reduce the number of non-targeted impressions.
- Increase the number of clicks on targeted impressions.
- Write an ad that has a high quality score (corresponding to the target request).
Simply put, there is no need for advertising construction company was shown using the key phrase “how to fill a screed with your own hands” (reduce non-targeted impressions). And you need to make the ad as attractive as possible, which will be shown using the key phrase “turnkey repairs at N price” (increase the number of clicks on the ad).
Let's look at an example:
A completely unsuccessful ad is highlighted in red, which means that the campaign creators did not work on negative keywords. To be honest, the first announcement (about home moving) is also not so hot, because... the necessary information is only on the second page of the site; the ad could have been written better. Pay attention to the third announcement:
- The key phrase is included in the title (and is therefore highlighted, i.e. bold)
- The price is indicated (i.e., money will not be burned due to clicks from those who are not satisfied with the price)
- The advantages are indicated (work on a non-cash basis, delivery time for the car).
In fact, the third ad will be the most clickable, and accordingly, it will also have the most low price per click.
Let's move on to the campaign settings
When creating a new advertising campaign, there is every chance of spending 2 hours on correct setting, and then save money for weeks and months. For those who are now thinking “Pfft, what can you configure there for 2 hours, something for 5 minutes” - please read, check each stage and write in the comments if you found something useful for yourself.
Start
Once the advertising starts showing, everything seems to be clear - you can prepare advertising in advance for a holiday - New Year, March 8, May holidays, etc. The main thing is not to forget to stop it by indicating the end date. Not every advertiser needs this, but if you have New Year's promotion(for example, discounts in December), it would be logical to add an end date so that in the pre-New Year bustle you don’t forget to stop advertising. Otherwise it will turn out like this (screenshot taken on January 21):
When you click on an ad element with an attractive discount, the site displays a blank page with discounts for the previous month.
Notifications and SMS notifications are not needed by everyone. SMS notifies you about the moderation status of the campaign and the need to top up your account. In notifications on email The most useful feature is “receive a warning about a position change.” This is necessary when advertising in niches where urgency is a priority. Basically, search ads on the first two pages look like this:
1) Special accommodation
2) Guaranteed impressions
3) Ads for which the bid was not enough to be shown either in special placement or in the guarantee - dynamic impressions.
If a potential client is looking for something that is “on fire”, for example:
- who can help you urgently obtain a passport;
- urgent blood test;
- urgent production of business cards, seals, stamps, keys;
- emergency opening of a lock in an apartment or car.
It is unlikely that he will scroll to the block marked with the number “3” without finding a suitable offer on the previous 20 search results sites and advertising blocks.
Therefore, notifications about position changes are a mandatory setting for topics where they are willing to overpay for urgency.
Choosing a Strategy
We will consider only one strategy - “ Manual control rates”, with the options “only on search”, on a minimum position in special placement and guarantees.
Manual bid management allows you to work more efficiently in complex topics. In addition, without understanding where and why automatic strategies are used, their use is often tantamount to “wasting” advertising budget. Earlier in the article I mentioned examples of urgent topics - there you need to know for sure that ads for the necessary key phrases are shown at least on the first page, ideally in special placement. Controlling this using automatic strategies is more difficult.
Next - be sure to separate search advertising and advertising in YAN ( advertising network"Yandex"). There are several reasons for this:
- different principles for selecting key phrases (for display in YAN, more general phrases are used; there, the selection of negative keywords is not as critical as when advertising on search);
- the ability to set different rates;
- different principles for writing advertisements;
- It’s easier to view the statistics of advertising campaigns - you don’t need to go to the “Report Wizard” to find out what part of the funds was spent on “Search” and what part on YAN.
Since the purpose of this article is to tell you how to save money on advertising, I recommend checking the “Show in the lowest possible position” option. You have already seen from the example of cargo transportation that placement in the 1st and 2nd positions of special placement does not provide significant advantages if the advertisement is not composed correctly. And in many topics (especially expensive ones), the cost of entry to special placement (i.e. display in 3rd place in the block) can differ several times. For example:
The difference between the predicted write-off price in 1st and 3rd place is about 20%. However, it is unlikely that wholesale buyer will not open all 3 advertised sites. Moreover, the decision here will primarily depend on the conditions offered, and not on which site was opened first.
If you pay attention to the cost of forecasting the write-off price in guaranteed impressions, you will see that you can get visitors by saving not 20%, but more than 2 times. Of course, there will be fewer visitors - but there are many topics where the advertiser himself is not able to process a large flow of orders.
Bid adjustments
"Direct" allows you to assign decreasing or increasing coefficients for the target audience, for advertising on mobile devices, as well as by gender and age. Target audiences are material for a separate article; in a nutshell there is no point in writing anything.
But adjusting bids for impressions on mobile phones, as well as by age and gender, is mandatory for most topics. To understand which of these to increase and decrease, just go to Yandex Metrica, to the report “Standard reports” - “Visitors” - “Age” or “Gender”. For example:
The highest bounce rate is among audiences under 24 years of age. If for the same period we go to a report that shows only visitors who visited landing pages (each has its own, for example, the “Thank you for your order” page), we will see the following:
Not a single target visitor is under 25 years old. This means that for advertising you can safely assign a maximum reduction factor based on age. Indirectly, we may lose part of the audience whose age Yandex could not determine. But if you look at the numbers in the last two screenshots, we will save 15% of the advertising budget. Here's some food for thought:
- who searches and buys auto parts more often?
- target audience of the online store women's clothing?
- Do 40-year-old men buy various funny cases for smartphones?
The list can go on for a long time.
Time targeting
There are several ways to save money using time targeting:
- if the key phrases have enough impressions, you can divide them into 2-4 campaigns (before and after lunch, on weekdays and on weekends) and compare costs and the number of targeted actions.
- do not show advertising at a time when you cannot provide the service (for example, delivery of pizza or sushi is rarely needed the next morning - if you do not accept orders from 11:00 pm to 7:00 am - what is the point of showing advertising at this time?)
- use increasing coefficients during “hot” hours. If you deliver lunches to the office, the main percentage of orders arrive before lunch, and advertising will work more effectively at this time.
- The time zone is also set here. If the main channel of orders is the telephone, and advertising is carried out throughout the country (this is not uncommon in many b2b areas), you need to compare the operating hours of operators with time zones so as not to be surprised a large number missed calls.
Single address and telephone
Most often, the same contact information is used for all ads in a campaign.
Why is this necessary to indicate? You must use any method that can make your ad more noticeable. Contact information makes the ad 1 line larger, which is especially noticeable if competitors do not indicate contact information, do not set quick links and do not have a store on Yandex Market (then the advertisement contains a 5-star rating and a link to the store on YaMarket). Let's look at an example:
Here you can clearly see that in the first place the ad occupies 7 lines, in the second – 5, and in the third – 4. I.e. the first ad is almost 2 times larger in size, and, accordingly, more noticeable. It would seem that advertisements in the 1st and 2nd place of special placement should collect all the transitions to their sites. If they weren’t from Moscow, and I wasn’t looking for a move to Rostov. Because you need to use what correctly?
Single negative keywords
To increase CTR, you need to choose the right words and phrases, when entered by the user, your advertisement will NOT be shown. How does this save money? You remember that CTR is the ratio of impressions to clicks multiplied by 100. It turns out
1000 impressions and 50 clicks – CTR=5.
500 impressions and 50 clicks – CTR=10.
Therefore, in order to increase the CTR with an equal number of clicks (thus reducing the cost per click), it is enough to remove impressions for those phrases that definitely will not bring customers.
You have a chance to remove not even half of the ineffective impressions, but more. Let's take an example - take a retail online store that wants to advertise a category with women's berets:
When collecting queries for advertising, you should use not 1-2 queries, but several dozen or hundreds (transliteration, synonyms, brands, etc.), and work out negative keywords for the niche as a whole. For local businesses, it is also better to collect in Russia or without specifying the region at all, and then apply negative keywords to the desired region. Let's see what the result looks like after three minutes of searching and adding negative words:
Just 20+ negative keywords reduced the number of impressions by more than 2 times. In some topics, the percentage of “garbage” impressions reaches 70-80%.
Do you think the negative keywords field in a campaign allows you to fit 20,000 characters just like that? Another 4,000 characters go for each ad group. And in broad niches like auto parts, this is lacking.
Settings in networks and impressions for additional relevant phrases
As for displaying for additional relevant phrases, I think it’s better to disable this option. It’s better to spend more time selecting key phrases and backing tracks than hoping that the Yandex algorithm will do it for you. From what I had to deal with:
- substitution of another city for tourism topics;
- displays for another brand of car (for auto parts);
- impressions based on information requests.
In general, the following screenshot illustrates what can usually be seen in Metrica if you analyze impressions based on automatically added phrases:
The bounce rate is higher, the depth of site viewing is lower.
Site monitoring
This option is required to be enabled. Whether or not to set up receiving SMS if the site is down is everyone’s personal choice, but everyone needs to stop advertising if there are problems with the site. I was lucky - in my personal collection of stories there are no horror stories like “one advertiser forgot to pay for hosting and burned a hundred thousand rubles in a week while the site was not working.” Here are the stories:
- The site engine did not support special characters in the URL, i.e. when setting up UTM tags or marking up links (which contain the characters “?” or “&”), while the server gave the correct response code “200” instead of the code “404” (that is, the ads were moderated and were shown), but the 404 was shown page.
- The advertiser changed the structure of links on the site without approval - the advertisement led to empty category pages without products.
These points are not directly related to monitoring, but they need to be thought through. Usually such things quickly appear in Metrica (the failure rate is off the charts), but for this you need to look there. Do you or your contractor look every day? Well, maybe at least every week?
You didn’t enable this option, and now you’re thinking, “What if I wasted my money?” Do not worry. If Metrica is installed on the site, you can find out when your site was unavailable. To do this, go to “Standard reports” - “Monitoring” - “Checks”.
Advanced settings
If you want to save money, disable:
- Auto phrase expansion;
- Autofocus
And check this box:
If you take into account the automatically stopped ads of competitors, you overpay, competing with those who set inflated bids.
8 little tricks
1. To collect the maximum number of queries in a complex niche, for which wordstat.yandex.ru even on page 40 shows a high frequency, for example:
Use quoted repetitions of phrases. If you enter “request request”, all two-word key phrases containing the word “request” will be shown. Using the same air tickets as an example:
The more requests, the more “hot” and “warm” ones you will select from among them. This applies not only to Direct. Do you think it makes sense for an online heating equipment store to provide answers to the following questions on its website:
When selecting queries, use the operators:
“+” - is placed before the prepositions “in”, “on”, “for”, etc.
“-” - used to filter out negative words.
"!" - fixes the word form. For example, in b2b topics you can immediately record
plurals. You’re not looking for a cabinet using the query “buy cabinets”?
"" - fixes the order of words in the key phrase. “tickets Moscow St. Petersburg” and “tickets St. Petersburg Moscow” are different requests.
And, actually, quotes. The phrase in quotation marks is shown without tails:
These same operators are used not only when selecting key phrases. They should also be used when creating advertisements.
2. In addition to the initially collected list of negative keywords, it is necessary to regularly analyze advertising for “junk” impressions and add negative keywords to the campaign and to individual advertisements. This saves money directly (the “wrong” visitors for whom you pay in Direct don’t come to you), and indirectly – you increase CTR, reducing untargeted impressions.
3. Group queries by landing pages. The times when in any niche of a website it was once or twice a thing are done are long gone. If, when searching for a specific auto spare part, a competitor has a photo, price, delivery time, and you only have a page “all spare parts for car brand N - call!”, you spend money on advertising very wastefully. This is very clearly visible in “pampered” niches with fairly high checks:
4. In any niche there are main requests. The main queries of SEO, Direct and all that. If you dig too deeply into a niche and follow the “1 request - 1 ad” principle, you can “finely chop” your advertising campaign so much that many requests will not accumulate enough statistics to make your hard work pay off.
For example, for queries with a frequency of 10 and 7, the CTR may not accumulate even in a month, and you will pay more than a competitor who created one clickable ad for all queries in the group.
5. Include queries in the title and text of the ad - this reduces the predicted (and real) cost per click. See for yourself:
Apart from prices, where will the CTR be higher? Who will save more?
6. Use all the elements to make your ad more noticeable:
- Quick links;
- enter part of the request into the displayed link, if appropriate;
- store on Yandex Market with good rating will add stars to your ads.
7. Set bids based not on CTR indicators, forecasting clicks, positions, etc. Focus on business indicators: what is the visitor/order conversion, the average check, the average customer payment for the entire time, what rate can you afford. What's the use of a good CTR if advertising doesn't pay off?
8. Use retargeting. In niches with a long period of time for making a decision to return someone who has already visited the site potential client easier (and cheaper) than attracting a new one.
Check list
In conclusion, here is a small checklist of things to check:
- check who owns the advertising account;
- if the advertisement is “for an event”, we check the start and end dates of impressions;
- setting up notifications;
- choice of strategy and its additional settings;
- adjusting bids for the target audience;
- correct time targeting;
- is the address and telephone number indicated?
- there should be a lot of negative words;
- disable impressions on networks;
- Is site monitoring enabled?
- whether auto-impressions and auto-extensions are disabled;
- is it possible to collect more requests in the niche;
- whether you use operators in your ads if they are appropriate;
- Do you add to the list of negative keywords?
- Ads lead to landing pages;
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