Perry Marshall, Brian Todd
Comprehensive guide
Brad Gedds
What, where and when to do to get the 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 spread on the websites and blogs of specialists working with contextual advertising, as well as 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 do you work with affiliate programs? Then you are probably wondering how to minimum expenses and in the shortest possible time to attract the maximum possible number of potential customers to your Internet resource. And, accordingly, earn really big money on the sale of their goods or services.
Over the years of his 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 to multi-level affiliate programs. Gradually I came to the conclusion: today there is nothing more effective contextual advertising. It is it 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. I b about Most of them are put in the way of illiterate advertisers by the largest Russian contextual advertising system 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, wasted, and at best, it just paid for advertising without any profit!
Moreover, problems often arise not only for novice Yandex.Direct users who are not familiar with the pricing system. Even "shooting sparrows" sometimes despair, trying to understand where and in what they managed to make a mistake.
This book about the intricacies and secrets of working with the Yandex.Direct contextual advertising system is written for advertisers who are tired of dubious experiments. Indeed, 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 that 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 significantly reduce budgets without compromising attendance;
How to get your ads to rank best on a limited budget, etc.
What will you learn by reading this book:
Compose ads with a high CTR (from 50% and above);
Get into special placement for 3 cents per click;
Conduct guerrilla warfare with competitors;
Collect tons of thematic traffic for 1 cent;
Identify keywords that do not bring you profit;
In two clicks, collect a semantic core consisting of many thousands of queries;
Compose 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;
Growth of rates in the absence of competition;
Low efficiency of ad texts and headlines.
This book will be useful to you if:
You need knowledge for the subsequent device on high paying job on the current specialty "manager for contextual advertising";
Are you a business owner and want to use effective modern instruments to attract potential customers to your site.
Introduction
Before starting this book, I would like to briefly describe how the material presented in it should be assimilated.
First of all, let's deal with the terms that are encountered 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 its impressions. Measured in 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 (definition source - Wikipedia).
Syntax Yandex.Direct- additional operators of the word selection form, with the help of which you can clarify the queries you need (the source of the definition is the official help for Yandex.Direct).
Traffic- a synonym for the word "attendance". If the text says: “The traffic for the specified queries exceeds the traffic for the main query by 5 times,” it means: “The traffic for the specified queries exceeds the traffic for the main query by 5 times.”
keyward- key phrase in the ad.
Relevance– compliance of the user's request with the contextual ad shown to him.
These are the main 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 all possible options keywords. In the search, as a rule, not only standard services that have already become familiar are involved, but also separate databases of keywords of a particular topic.
In a nutshell, the entire process of managing contextual advertising cannot be described. There are books, special sites and forums on this topic. Since I am writing for site owners who are not experts in web technologies, here I will give only those points that should be given priority attention.
In general, it must be remembered that effective management contextual advertising requires experience, a decent amount of time and, in difficult cases, also special programs. Not every site owner has enough time to master all this craft. Therefore, it makes sense to involve specialists, if not for daily management of the context, then at least for audit and correction from time to time. The cost of specialists will pay off with a gain in the price of targeted traffic. Actually, this article is about what these specialists do.
I remind you that the effectiveness of contextual advertising, as well as other types of website promotion, is evaluated by numerical indicators, the simplest of which is cost of one interested visitor. In contextual advertising, this indicator is called at the cost of a click (cpc cost per click). It is important to remember here that the site needs targeted visitors, and not all in a row, i.e. it is necessary to monitor the quality of traffic, at least for the depth of viewing the site and the percentage of failures.
For simplicity, we will assume that we are launching contextual advertising in Yandex Direct, in other context systems similar work is done, although the details of this process are slightly different for Google Adwords and Begun. Consider the work on the example of a contextual advertising campaign in Direct with a budget of 10-20 tr. per month.
Launch of contextual advertising
But for fuzzy requests, there is no such price reduction. The price for them is growing, in which place do not show the ad. For such ads, you need to refine your keywords using stop words. For example, our ad for the query “transportation of goods” should not be shown on a query with the word “to the country house” and the word “automobile”, because we offer sea container transportation. We need to study what requests visitors go to the site for and prohibit impressions for words we don’t need.
In competitive topics, using stop words is not enough to get a good CPC. Then it is necessary to use refined queries - to abandon the query "transportation of goods" and replace it with several refined queries "transportation of goods in a container", "container transportation of goods", "sea transportation of goods", etc. Exact queries in Yandex Direct are written in quotation marks. At this point, the list of words grows sometimes more than ten times. I remind you that for each clarified request, you must write your own ad. The list of ads can grow tenfold or more and reach thousands of ads.
Fighting competitors in contextual advertising on Yandex
Suppose we have achieved good prices and our ads lead targeted visitors to our site. And then it turns out that our competitors also decided to show contextual advertising for the same queries. They set the price higher than ours and push us out of the special placement into an area where the probability of a click decreases. If the topic is competitive, then this happens immediately - competitors will not even let us collect statistics.
In such situations, you have to look for tactics to get around competitors. Sometimes the "props" method works in Yandex.Direct. In a simplified form, this method looks like this. Sometimes one of our competitors sets outrageous cost per click. It relies on an auto broker to automatically lower the price to the price of the next listing.
Let's analyze the situation real example from life (in the picture, a snapshot from a real campaign): a competitor set a price of $10.00, in this case we are offered to take the first special placement at $10.01. If the nearest competitor put up only 1.03, then the autobroker reduces his price to 1.04. A $10 bet might want to be in first place with a guarantee, regardless of the other participants' bets. This is rather reckless on his part. In such a situation, we can set a price of 9.99 - we “prop up” a competitor. The autobroker continues to show our ads at a low price, but the competitor's ads start to roll out at $10.00 per click. A few of these clicks a day - and soon his budget will be exhausted, and we will remain in the best position.
Only now, if we made a backup, then we need to closely monitor it, because. they can support us. Those. props must be constantly checked, literally hourly. With a budget of 15 tr. for a month we only have $50 a day, so we don't need 9.99 clicks at all.
If our competitor is experienced and strong, then it is better not to impose a budget war on him. Partisan tactics must be used against the strong. It is necessary to investigate in which regions and at what time it shows its ads. And take the best places in those regions and at a time when he is absent.
Because Direct does not allow you to set different prices for one campaign in different regions, so to differentiate prices by region, you will have to create separate copies of the advertising campaign. We do the same with time zones, if we work for several time zones, we create additional copies of ads.
It is also advisable to collect traffic on the sites of the Yandex contextual advertising network. In the advertising network, the cost of the transition can be set much lower - this is its plus. Visitors from the advertising network are not of such high quality, "hot" traffic rarely comes from there, but it is quite possible to get "warm" traffic if you correctly adjust the texts of contextual ads and revise the lists of keywords. Therefore, for the contextual network, you will have to create a separate advertising campaign with “warm” ad texts and reduced bids.
Growth of contextual advertising campaigns
The techniques listed here lead to the fact that contextual advertising campaigns in competitive topics become very voluminous. If our initial campaign contained a list of words (and ads) of one or two hundred, then after refining the queries, we got a campaign of a thousand ads, and after creating its replicas for regions or time zones, the word list was multiplied by the number of regions. Plus, an advertising campaign for contextual network sites. You have to manage several thousand ads. In principle, this is normal even for small context budgets of 10-20 tr. per month. And larger budgets tend to be spread across even larger lists of search queries and ads.
We see that a PPC manager needs to manage several thousand bids, and these prices need to be checked daily, if not more frequently. It is necessary to constantly analyze the behavior of competitors, eliminate the weak, evade the strong and look for free niches.
How often should you review your keyword lists?
Firstly, you need to constantly clean out advertising campaigns from words for which there is a very low CTR - these words lead to an increase in rates for all advertising.
Secondly, you need to select more attractive texts that allow you to increase CTR. To facilitate this process, various techniques are used, such as split testing ads.
Thirdly, the advertising campaign must track changes in marketing. When a product is temporarily out of stock, it makes sense to pause its advertising. Not to mention promotions and sales, which are constantly conducted in all trading companies, and which should be reflected in contextual advertising.
Regions show at least a twofold increase in search activity in a year. Following users, advertisers also come to the Internet, which leads to increased competition in contextual advertising. The figure shows Yandex statistics. It can be seen that the frequency of the request "buy a car" in Siberia in 2010 increased by 2.5 times. Other commercial requests have the same growth.
Fourth, the Internet is developing very dynamically, especially in the regions. Now the audience in the regions shows more than a twofold increase in a year. Naturally, after consumers go to the Internet and advertisers. Therefore, competition in contextual advertising is constantly growing. In the regions, competition increases two to three times a year. If word lists are not reviewed for a whole year, then you can be very upset by the results of such advertising. Therefore, it is reasonable to review all advertising campaigns in Yandex.Direct once a quarter, and restart them completely once every half a year.
By the way, in the central regions (Moscow and St. Petersburg), where audience growth is now ending, the competition in contextual advertising is already very strong. For some requests in Yandex in these regions, more than one and a half hundred ads are displayed simultaneously. Therefore, the management of contextual advertising in such cases is especially difficult due to the constant activity of competitors.
Analysis of the effectiveness of contextual advertising
I already wrote the main considerations about this in the section on measuring the effectiveness of promotion - you need to keep track of site visitors in the context of referral sources. It is necessary to analyze their actions on the site, in the simplest version - to monitor the viewing depth and time spent on the site.
More information will be given by accounting for conversions on the site, but it is more difficult to understand and manage. Accounting for conversions is difficult in the service sector, on premium product sites, on sites accompanied by offline trading, and in a number of other cases. So this complication of accounting can bring more problems than benefits. Therefore, I do not believe that accounting for conversions will be useful for any customer.
To manage contextual advertising will be useful information in the context of contextual ads and individual search queries in order to compare different ads with each other. There are special techniques for this: you can use cgi tags in the url addresses of contextual ads, you can use counters from the contextual network itself. In tandem with Yandex Direct contextual advertising, it is reasonable to use Yandex Metrica, and Google Adwords statistics are best studied using Google Analytics.
When advertising in several contextual advertising systems, reports from different systems must be brought to the same format in order to receive comparable data. For example, Direct keeps track of expenses in dollars with VAT, while Adwords keeps track of expenses in rubles without VAT. For a summary report, all costs must be reduced to a common denominator.
How much does contextual advertising management cost?
Well, we briefly reviewed what a contextual advertising manager should do when managing advertising with a budget of 10-20 tr. per month. We see that he is provided with a daily download even with the indicated modest budget. To obtain high efficiency, you must constantly work on an advertising company.
How to choose a performer for this work, you can decide for yourself. I outlined my thoughts on this in an article on choosing a site promotion service provider.
It is now quite common to involve advertising agencies to manage contextual advertising. When working with Direct, they receive 10-12% of the client's expenses from Yandex, so these services are free for the client.
But one should not have any illusions about this. It is clear that all the works listed on this page advertising agency will not undertake to do for 10% -12% of 20 tr. It's simply impossible - for such a small amount of money to manage daily bids for hundreds or even thousands of requests for a whole month, compile analytical reports, track competitors, work on ad texts and regularly review everything. advertising texts and requests.
If you, as a customer, want quality work, then discuss with the agency (or other contractor) the entire list of necessary services and pay them, for example, an additional percentage of advertising budget. My opinion is that effective work can be only when paying 30-40% of the advertising budget. Believe me, it's worth it, an experienced specialist will save you more by reducing the price of each site visitor.
Article author
Dmitry Skalubo
This material will be useful for advertisers who use the Yandex Direct contextual advertising system and advertise on Yandex search. If you delegate advertising management, you will be able to check if you are spending too much due to the contractor's mistakes. If you manage on your own, you will be able to find out if you are using all the features of Direct.
There is no universal recipe that will allow you to set up and launch advertising in any topic. But the mistakes that are found in almost every advertiser are repeated. Therefore, the main purpose of the article is to introduce you to the main ways to save your advertising budget, thanks to the correct understanding of campaign settings and the basics of creating ads.
Account registration errors
The two most common are:
1. Registration of an advertising account for a contractor without specifying in the contract who is its owner. A completely neglected case - there are no contracts, advertising is carried out by agreement with the performer, who "does everything himself, you don't even have to register with Yandex Direct."
Why is that bad?
In fact, when you pay for the work of a performer to set up advertising, you do not have full access to the tool in which it is conducted. If for some reason you have to part with the performer, you risk getting an exciting opportunity to start everything from scratch.
Also, "Yandex" does not make a secret of the fact that agencies receive a commission from the funds spent on agency 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 the agency's profits at your expense?
If the account of "Direct" and "Metrica" is located on different logins, the performer may forget to indicate the counter number in the campaign settings. This means that it will be more difficult to find ineffective keywords and landing pages.
In fairness, I’ll say that many advertisers themselves treat advertising “in a slipshod manner”, multiplying unscrupulous performers by this. I remember most of all the case when the audit got an advertisement leading to a specially created one-page site for real estate services. Applications through the form feedback easy to track, but most of the applications went through the phone. The simplest and cheapest tracking solution would be to buy a separate SIM card and change the number on the one page. I can hardly forget the advertiser's answer - "We feel when they call for advertising."
How to avoid mistakes:
- When working with a freelancer - ad account must be registered to the advertiser.
- If you are working under an agreement with an agency/contractor, specify - in case the cooperation is terminated, how you will receive all advertising campaigns, the setup and maintenance of which you paid for.
- Check if "Yandex Metrica" and "Yandex Direct" are on the same account, if not, make sure that the "Metrica" counter is specified in the campaign settings.
Understanding what affects CPC
From Yandex help:
Click Through Rate (CTR)- the ratio of the number of clicks on an ad to the number of impressions, measured as a percentage. We can say that this indicator determines the effectiveness of the ad. The higher the CTR, the more the ad matches the request and the lower the entry price for guaranteed impressions or special placement will be for you
- Reduce the number of untargeted impressions.
- Increase the number of clicks on targeted impressions.
- Write an ad that has a high quality score (corresponding to the target query).
Simply put, no need to advertise construction company was shown for the key phrase “how to pour a screed with your own hands” (reduce non-target impressions). And you need to make the ad as attractive as possible, which will be shown for the key phrase “turnkey repair at N-sk price” (increase the number of clicks on the ad).
Let's take a 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 better. Take a look at the third announcement:
- The key phrase is included in the title (and therefore highlighted, i.e. bold)
- The price is indicated (i.e. money will not be burned due to clicks of those who are not satisfied with the price)
- The advantages are indicated (work on a bank transfer, the deadline for submitting a car).
In fact, the third ad will be the most clickable, and accordingly, it will also have the lowest CPC.
Go to Campaign Settings
When creating a new advertising campaign, there is every chance to spend 2 hours on correct setting and then save money for weeks and months. For those who now thought “Pfft, what can be set there for 2 hours, things for 5 minutes” - please read, check each step and write in the comments if you found something useful for yourself.
Start
With the start of showing ads, everything seems to be clear - you can prepare ads in advance for the holiday - the new year, March 8, May holidays, etc. The main thing is not to forget to stop it, indicating the end date. Not every advertiser needs this, but if you have a New Year's promotion (for example, discounts in December), it would be logical to add an end date so that you don't forget to stop advertising in the New Year's bustle. And it will turn out like this (screenshot taken on January 21):
When you click on an ad element with an attractive discount, the site has an empty page with last month's discounts.
Notifications and SMS notifications are not for everyone. SMS notify about campaign moderation statuses and about the need to replenish the account. In notifications for email the most useful feature is “receive a position change alert”. This is necessary when placing ads 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, the bid for which was not enough to be shown either in the special placement or in the guarantee - dynamic impressions.
If a potential client is looking for something that "burns", for example:
- who will help to urgently issue a passport;
- urgent blood test;
- urgent production of business cards, seals, stamps, keys;
- emergency opening of the lock in the apartment or car.
It is unlikely that he will scroll to the block marked with the number "3" without finding suitable offer on the previous 20 SERP sites and ad units.
Therefore, position change notifications are a mandatory setting for topics where they are ready to overpay for urgency.
Choosing a strategy
We will consider only one strategy - "Manual bid management", with the options "only on search", on the minimum position in special placement and guarantee.
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 “draining” the advertising budget. Earlier in the article, I mentioned examples of urgent topics - there you need to know for sure that ads for the right keywords are shown at least on the first page, ideally in special placement. Controlling this using automatic strategies is more difficult.
The next one is in without fail separate advertising on search and advertising in YAN (Yandex advertising network). There are several reasons for this:
- a different principle for selecting key phrases (more general phrases are used for display in YAN, the selection of negative keywords is not as critical there as when advertising on search);
- the ability to set different rates;
- different principles of writing advertisements;
- it is easier to view the statistics of advertising campaigns - you do not need to go into the "Report Wizard" to find out what part of the funds was spent on "Search" and what part - on YAN.
Since the purpose of the article is to tell you how to save on advertising, I recommend checking the option “Show in the lowest possible position”. You have already seen in the example of cargo transportation that placement on the 1st and 2nd positions of special placement does not provide significant advantages if the advertisement is written incorrectly. And in many topics (especially expensive ones), the cost of entry into special placement (i.e. showing in 3rd place in the block) can differ several times. For example:
The difference between the forecast write-off price in the 1st and 3rd place is about 20%. At the same time, it is unlikely that the wholesale buyer will not open all 3 advertised sites. Moreover, the decision here will primarily depend on the proposed conditions, and not on which site was opened first.
If you pay attention to the cost of the write-off price forecast 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.
Rate Adjustment
"Direct" allows you to assign decreasing or increasing coefficients for target audience, for ads on mobile devices, and by gender and age. Target audiences are material for a separate article; in a nutshell, it doesn’t even make sense to write something.
But adjusting bids for impressions on mobile, as well as by age and gender, is mandatory for most topics. To understand what to raise and lower from this, just go to Yandex Metrica, to the report Standard Reports - Visitors - Age or Gender. For example:
Most big indicator bounces - in an audience under the age of 24 years. If for the same period we go to the report, which shows only the visitors who visited the landing pages (each has its own, for example, the “Thank you for the order” page), we will see the following:
No targeted visitor under 25 years of age. This means that for advertising, you can safely assign the maximum reduction factor by age. Indirectly, we may lose part of the audience whose age Yandex could not determine. But if you look at the figures of the last two screenshots, we will save 15% of the advertising budget. Here's some food for thought:
- Who is more likely to look for and buy auto parts?
- target audience of the online store women's clothing?
- Do 40-year-old uncles buy different funny cases for smartphones?
The list can be continued for a long time.
Time targeting
There are several ways to save money with temporal targeting:
- if 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 ads at a time when you cannot provide a service (for example, pizza or sushi delivery is rarely needed the next morning - if you do not take orders from 23:00 to 7:00 in the morning - what's the point of showing ads at this time?)
- use multiplying factors during "hot" hours. If you deliver lunch to the office, the bulk of orders go before lunch, and advertising will work more efficiently at that time.
- the time zone is also set here. If the main channel for orders is the phone, and advertising is distributed throughout the country (this is not uncommon in many b2b topics), you need to compare the working hours of operators with time zones so as not to be surprised by the large number of missed calls.
Single address and phone
Most often, the same contact information is used for all ads in a campaign.
Why is this required? You must use any method that can make your ad stand out. 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 ad has a rating of 5 stars, 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. That is. the first ad is almost 2 times higher in size, and, accordingly, more noticeable. It would seem that ads - on the 1st and 2nd place of special placement should collect all the transitions to their sites. If they were not from Moscow, and I was not looking for a move in Rostov. Because what needs to be used correctly?
Single negative keywords
To increase CTR, you need to choose the right words and phrases, when entered by the user, your ad 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 will definitely not bring customers.
You also have a chance to remove not even half of the ineffective impressions, but more. Let's take an example - let's take an online retail store that wants to advertise a category with women's berets:
When collecting requests for advertising, you should use not 1-2 requests, but several tens or hundreds (transliteration, synonyms, brands, etc.), and work out negative keywords for the niche as a whole. For local business 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 a three-minute selection and adding negative words:
A total of 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 keyword field in a campaign can fit 20,000 characters for no reason? Another 4,000 characters goes for each ad group. And in wide niches like auto parts, this is not enough.
Network settings and impressions for additional relevant phrases
As for showing for additional relevant phrases, I think it's better to disable this option. It is better to devote more time to the selection of key phrases and the backing track than to hope that the Yandex algorithm will do it for you. From what I had to deal with:
- substituting another city for a tourist theme;
- impressions for another brand of car (for auto parts);
- impressions on information requests.
In general, the following screenshot illustrates what you can usually see in Yandex.Metrica if you analyze impressions for automatically added keywords:
The bounce rate is higher, the site viewing depth is less.
Site monitoring
This option must be enabled. Whether or not to set up receiving SMS if the site is “down” is a personal matter for everyone, but everyone needs to stop advertising in case of problems with the site. I was lucky - in my personal piggy bank 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 down.” And these were 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 symbols "?" or "&"), while the server returned the correct response code "200" instead of the code "404" (i.e. ads were moderated and shown), but it was shown when this 404 page.
- The advertiser changed the structure of links on the site without approval - the ad 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 come out in Metrica (the bounce rate goes off scale), but for this you need to look there. Do you or your contractor watch every day? Well, maybe every week?
They 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, turn off:
- Phrase auto-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 rates.
8 little tricks
1. To collect the maximum number of requests in a complex niche, for which wordstat.yandex.ru even on the 40th page shows a high frequency, for example:
Use quote repetitions of phrases. If you enter "query query" - then all two-word key phrases containing the word "query" will be displayed. On the example of the same tickets:
The more requests, the more among them you will select "hot" and "warm". This applies not only to Direct. Do you think it makes sense for an online store of heating equipment to give 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 fix
plurals. You are not looking for a cabinet with 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, quotation marks. The phrase enclosed in quotation marks is displayed without tails:
The same operators are used not only in the selection of key phrases. They should also be used when compiling ads.
2. In addition to the initially collected list of negative keywords, it is necessary to regularly analyze ads for “junk” impressions and add negative keywords to the campaign and to individual advertisements. This saves money directly (the “wrong” visitors that you pay for in Direct do not come to you), and indirectly, you increase CTR by reducing non-target impressions.
3. Group requests by landing pages. The times when in any niche of sites there were one or two and counted, are long gone. If, when searching for a specific auto part, a competitor has a photo, price, delivery time, and you only have a page “all parts for brand N cars – call!”, You spend money on advertising very wastefully. This is very clearly seen in the "spoilt" niches with fairly high checks:
4. Every niche has top queries. The main requests of SEO, "Direct" and all that. If you dig too deep into a niche and follow the “1 request - 1 ad” principle, you can “grind” your advertising campaign so much that for many requests there will not accumulate enough statistics to make your hard work pay off.
For example, for queries with a frequency of 10 and 7, CTR may not accumulate even for a month, and you will pay more than a competitor who made 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:
Besides prices, where will the CTR be higher? Who will save more?
6. Use all the elements to make your ad stand out:
- Quick links;
- write part of the request in the displayed link, if appropriate;
- shop on "Yandex Market" with good rating will add stars to your listings.
7. Bid based on something other than CTR, click-through prediction, positions, etc. Focus on business indicators: what is the visitor / order conversion, average check, the average customer payment for all time, which rate you can afford. What's the point of having a good CTR if the ad doesn't pay off?
8. Use retargeting. In niches with a long decision-making time to return someone who has already visited the site potential client easier (and cheaper) than hiring a new one.
Check list
In conclusion, a small checklist of things to check:
- check who owns the ad account;
- if the ad is "for an event" - 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;
- whether the address and telephone number are indicated;
- there should be a lot of minus words;
- turn off impressions in networks;
- whether site monitoring is enabled;
- whether auto-displays and auto-expansions are disabled;
- is it possible to collect more requests in a niche;
- whether you use operators in declarations, if appropriate;
- whether you replenish the list of negative words;
- ads lead to landing pages; Please enable JavaScript to view the