VKontakte advertising campaign. What is Vkontakte targeting and how to set it up: a beginner's guide. Moderation of ads and the main parameters of an advertising campaign
Two facts. First: VKontakte is the most popular social network on the Russian Internet. Second: there are a lot of anti-cases on the network about VKontakte advertising - about how ineffective it is.
A simple conclusion suggests itself: not everyone can competently set up a targeted campaign from scratch. In this post, I tried to reveal all the nuances and tricks of the VKontakte advertising account so that even a beginner can set up effective targeting.
Where to begin?
Decide on your target audience
Take the relevant data from Yandex.Metrica or Google Analytics (“Audience” tab in the left menu). If there is no information about the target audience, you need to build a hypothesis about who your potential buyer might be.
When you have decided on the target audience, choose the options for placing your advertisements. Will you advertise your VK community, or attract users to the site for conversion.
Next, create a general budget for the advertising campaign. Also, be sure to set a test budget, as you cannot launch a campaign without a test. First you need to check audiences, banners and all settings. Remember that testing takes at least 2-3 days.
How to calculate the budget?
To calculate, you need to know the formulas and indicators that are used in targeted advertising:
- CPC - pay per click;
- CTR - click-through rate, defined as the ratio of the number of clicks to the number of impressions, measured as a percentage;
- CPM - payment for impressions (VKontakte you pay for 1000 impressions);
- CR is the conversion rate.
You can use two formulas to calculate the budget, depending on which type of payment you will be using:
- Budget \u003d Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) / 1000 x Number of impressions.
- Budget \u003d cost per click (CPC) x number of clicks.
Where can I get the CTR required for calculating? If this is your first campaign, use the average value for VKontakte (for teasers - 0.03%, for the feed - a little higher). In the future, take the arithmetic mean of the campaigns conducted.
Also, these formulas will be useful to you for calculations:
- Impressions \u003d clicks / CTR.
- CTR \u003d Clicks / Impressions.
- Clicks \u003d Impressions x CTR.
- Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) \u003d budget / impressions x 1000.
- Cost Per Click (CPC) \u003d Budget / Clicks.
- CR (conversion rate) \u003d number of conversions / number of clicks.
Let's consider an example:
You say that VKontakte advertising does not work well: some schoolchildren follow the ads, the entire budget is spent overnight, but there is no result? This happens if you choose the wrong target audience. In this article, you will learn how to properly set up VKontakte targeting in order to show ads to the right people.
Performance marketing from TexTerra - we are responsible for our work and bring new customers. You only pay for the result.
How VK targeting works
Imagine advertising auto repair services in Smolensk. You can show ads in the most popular VKontakte communities and wait for a response. If the ad says “Car repair in Smolensk”, clients will probably contact you. The problem is that you will pay for ad impressions to residents of Penza, Irkutsk and Vladivostok. In addition, you will spend money on showing ads to users from Smolensk and other cities that do not have a car. Moreover, you add funds to advertising services to people who drive expensive unbreakable foreign cars. And you specialize in the repair of domestic cars, and you have direct deliveries of spare parts from AvtoVAZ.
To spend money efficiently and close deals, you should only show ads to residents of Smolensk with a car. It is desirable that the ads be seen by people with not very new cars, to which spare parts from AvtoVAZ are suitable. This can be accomplished by targeting your target audience.
By using targeting, you virtually eliminate inappropriate ad impressions. For example, do not spend money on advertising holidays in Pattaya to schoolchildren who are still interested in football and dolls, and not walking along Walking Street. Ad targeting brings these benefits:
- Increased response: referrals and deals.
- Reduced costs.
- Reducing the cost of customer acquisition.
- Prevention of negative user reaction to inappropriate advertising.
- Showing ads to competitor audiences.
With this guide, you will learn how to target an audience on VKontakte.
How to set up Vkontakte targeting correctly
Select the ad format: "Image and Text", "Large Image", "Community Promotion".
Enter a title and text, upload an image, choose a topic. If necessary, you can set an age limit for impressions. At this stage, do not spend a lot of time on these actions. The challenge is to move on to audience targeting.
To use targeting effectively, you need to know your audience. To collect user data, research the market, survey real customers, use the buying persona method. You can read about him and.
For the experiment, imagine that the company operates in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. You serve clients in all cities of the region, except for Zheleznogorsk. It is known that you are most often approached by female office managers between the ages of 20 and 50. Another group of clients are IT specialists of large companies, 70% of whom are men. They are also between 20 and 50 years old.
How to set up geo targeting
Target the audience groups suggested above. First, select the geography of your ad impressions. Target Krasnoyarsk Krai and exclude Zheleznogorsk.
How to set up demographic targeting
As stated above, your potential clients include women who work as office managers and men and women who work in IT departments. Therefore, in the Gender section, leave the default. Choose male or female only if you are selling an explicitly male or female product, such as spinning rods or makeup. Keep in mind that in this case, too, you cut off potential customers, for example, women who are fond of fishing.
Enter the age of your audience. Under the terms of the experiment, we agreed to target customers between the ages of 20 and 50. This is a wide age range, so set it unchanged in the settings. If most of your customers are in a narrow age range, such as 25-30, try expanding your target group. Enter ages from 22 to 33 and rate the campaign's results.
If necessary, limit the audience of shows to birthday people.
Skip the Marital Status menu. Use it only in exceptional cases, for example, if you are selling Valentine's Day gifts.
When and how to use interest and category targeting
Interest targeting allows you to select audience segments. These are users who are currently interested in this or that product and are ready to buy it. For example, an advertiser can show ads to people who often buy from online stores, look after a car, and are interested in financial services. VKontakte classifies users as audience segments by their activity on the social network and on external sites.
How to target community members
The idea is very simple: if you show ads to members of thematic communities, the response will be higher. For example, you can show cartridge refueling advertisements to members of all relevant communities in a selected region.
To find suitable communities, use the VKontakte search. Using the filter, you can change the search criteria.
Also use the service allsocial.ru, with which you can search and rate communities. Be sure to exclude members of your community from your audience. Most likely, they will see the publication anyway.
Show ads to users of specific apps and sites
This task is accomplished using the Applications & Sites filter. Enter the name of the site of interest and save the options suggested by the system. At this stage, you can assess the potential reach and the feasibility of targeting the audience for the selected attribute.
If necessary, disable certain sites or applications from displaying users by using the "Except" filter. Check the "Travelers" box if you want to show ads to users who visit VKontakte while traveling abroad.
What to do with targeting by education and position
Look for your target audience by education only if you are interested in graduates from specific educational institutions. You can also target users who have recently graduated from school.
Use position targeting as a last resort and very carefully. This method of targeting can greatly narrow your audience or add non-targeted people to your audience. First, not all users indicate their title. Secondly, people who indicate all places of work on the page can get to the target audience.
For example, filter your audience by job title if you want to show ads to specific professionals. For example, use this type of targeting if you sell dental equipment. Keep in mind that the ads will not be seen by dentists who have not indicated their profession in their profile.
How to use retargeting
Users familiar with your business, product, website or VKontakte public respond to ads many times more often than a cold audience. This is a great reason to use retargeting.
To use retargeting, go to the corresponding menu in the VKontakte advertising account. Click the Create Audience button.
You can create an audience using the retargeting pixel or data from a file.
Upload a file with a database of email addresses, phone numbers or user profile ids. Check out requirements for downloadable information or use the recommendations:
- Use a CSV or TXT file.
- Write one address, id or phone number per line. Also, you can write data to a string separated by commas or semicolons. You can find out the user id using applications.
- Indicate your phone number in the following formats: +71111111111, 71111111111, 8-111-111-11-11.
You can also install a retargeting code on your site. In the Pixels menu, generate a pixel.
Copy the code and paste it on the site.
If the site is powered by WordPress, the code is conveniently inserted using the Head, Footer and Post Injections plugin.
Use the "Edit" menu to add / remove an audience or get your retargeting code again.
After filling your retargeting audience, create ads and launch an ad campaign.
What services increase the effectiveness of Vkontakte targeting
With the help of external services, you can improve the accuracy of targeting your target audience and make your advertising more effective. Pay attention to the following sites:
- Cerebro ... This is one of the most popular and effective external services for managing advertising on VKontakte. Targeting with the help of Cerebro provides such opportunities: search for an audience and a similar audience, highlighting active users of groups and publics, targeting potential customers who interacted with individual posts on VKontakte, searching for thematic communities, targeting user's friends and others.
- Pepper. Read about the capabilities of the service in our review.
- Allsocial. Using the service, you can search for thematic communities. Allsocial also quickly searches for group administrators and monitors group changes, such as name changes.
- Spotlight (free). Collects data from group members, targets users for different types of activity, for example, "I like" marks for certain posts or in certain groups. Also finds contacts of group admins. To use the service, you need to log in through your VKontakte account.
- Segmento target (paid). Using this service, you can target the audience of the VKontakte communities. The system also works with Facebook, Odnoklassniki and Instagram.
- Only Talk (free). Using this site, you can manage Vkontakte advertising campaigns, including target audiences.
To improve the effectiveness of advertising, you need to collect data on different segments of the target audience using one or more services. Save the received data in CSV or TXT format, and then create the corresponding retargeting groups.
Audience targeting is available in ad automation services such as Aori, Plarin, Sociate.Targeting. Targeting options are standard here, but automation systems provide advertisers with the ability to simultaneously manage advertising campaigns on multiple sites.
How targeting increases the effectiveness of Vkontakte advertising
In this section, you will find successful and unsuccessful examples of targeting the target audience of VKontakte. Cases are presented in the form of a list with a short announcement and a link to the source, where you can study the details. Take a look at the following targeting lessons:
- The author of an extravagant blog about SMM writes that thanks to the Cerebro Target service, he managed to significantly increase the CTR of ads, as well as achieve a higher conversion rate of conversions to applications compared to advertising in Vkontakte communities.
- The author of the group "Effective targeting" Anel Radiant talks about the experience of attracting 10 thousand subscribers to the group for 10 thousand rubles. The secret to the success of the gardening community ad campaign lies in the fine tuning of the targeting. The audience for ad impressions was determined by gender, age, and region of residence.
- The author of the blog "Sofa Theorist" Mikhail Bursin has gained very valuable experience in using targeting "Vkontakte". The system served the ad to the same people, which resulted in poor ad performance. This mini-case reminds you to use the option to limit ad impressions to one user.
- Colleagues from Magwai say that targeted advertising on Vkontakte showed higher efficiency in finding employees compared to paid publication on HeadHunter. Does anyone else think that VKontakte is a network for schoolchildren?
- Another case from Magwai shows the comparative effectiveness of targeted advertising on VKontakte, Yandex.Direct advertising in search and YAN. According to the author, ads in YAN bring more clicks and are cheaper for the advertiser.
- Colleagues from Icontext write that retargeting makes VKontakte advertising comparable in effectiveness to Google AdWords and Yandex.Direct.
- Maxim Lukyanov tells how, with the help of Cerebro, he managed to target an interested audience and get commercial traffic at a ridiculous price.
You can also see the large
Almost every person reads the news, and reading the news of friends on Vkontakte is a matter of principle. Here's how to use this moment to promote your community - in the advertising office you have the opportunity to launch a special campaign to advertise in the news of other people. What is news and how do I set it up? You will find the answer to this question in this detailed instruction..
- When promoting goods and services worth 4000 rubles or more.
- During the promotion of complex niches: real estate, legal services, construction.
- Working with a cold audience who needs more details about the project.
Pros and cons
- The ability to create records with large text accompaniment.
- The tape looks more natural. This increases the reach of your ads.
- The most effective method of promoting Vkontakte.
- The recording is available for distribution on all devices.
- Lack of payment for clicks.
How to start: 7 steps
Without further ado, let's list 7 basic steps.
Step # 1.
Step # 2
Click on the button "Create ad".
Step # 3
Step # 4
The feed is published on behalf of your community.
Step # 5
Choosing the subject of your ad.
When advertising products for a specific age category, you need to put a special label.
Step 6
We set up the target audience. We select the desired country or countries, city.
Birthday item is useful when advertising goods as a gift.
In the next section, specify the category of interests of the target audience. For example, when advertising women's clothing, you might include “Beauty and Fashion,” “Buy Online,” “Home and Family,” and so on.
In the communities, indicate publics and groups related to your topic.
Apps and sites. We indicate Vkontakte applications or third-party sites related to the subject of the advertisement.
The item "Travelers" shows entries to users who frequently visit Vkontakte from different IPs.
Education and work. If your target audience is students or representatives of a certain profession, then this tab will be very useful.
Extra options. Here you can add your base retargeting, collected from your site or using parsers.
Save settings. Here you can add the audience that has shown some action with your ads to the retargeting database. 
Step 7
We adjust the price and location. In the "Advertising sites" section, select where the entries will be shown: on mobile devices, in the full version, or on all sites.
The cost is indicated for 1000 impressions. The system automatically sets the amount. It can and even should be reduced to save budget. If coverage falls, then the cost should be increased.
We limit impressions to 5 per person.
At the end, click on "Create ad".
How to get the most out of your ads in the news: 3 tips
- Customize your ads for each audience segment.
- Choose bright and catchy images.
- Show ads on web and mobile devices separately.
Segment your audience. You don't need to run one ad campaign for all segments at the same time. This will save your budget and increase conversions.
Hello! If you decide to set up targeted advertising on Vkontakte, then a lot of questions immediately arise. How much money do you need to start an advertising campaign? Which settings should I choose and which ones to ignore, given my individual project? How do I find images? What is the best image format? What is CTR and what is CPM, what is the difference and what to choose? What is retargeting and how to use it? In order to save you from unnecessary fuss, we will consider all these issues and not only in this article.
Skeptics will say, “I've tried! Targeted ads don't work! I spent a lot of money. " Dear comrades, the violin will not play in the hands of a hippo! Tried it - it didn't work, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work. Means somewhere wrong. Thousands of companies on Vkontakte use this tool and get clients every day. It just takes a little patience and skill.
In the meantime, I will give this infographic:
I also want to warn people who are just trying online advertising. First of all, I recommend you such an advertising channel as, you should first work in that direction. Targeted advertising is more "long traffic" and in some niches it can still compete with contextual advertising in the rate of conversion of a visitor to a buyer. But in most cases it is better to start with contextual advertising, and only then connect targeted advertising. And using a combination of contextual advertising + targeting Vkontakte will help to significantly increase efficiency. I will talk about this in the next article, because now it will be difficult to talk about all the subtleties, but I will give you some guidelines. So, let's begin.
To make it easier to navigate, let's conditionally divide the whole process into 2 stages. Namely:
- Training: basic terms, preparation for testing ads, creating an advertising office.
- Setting: Let's go through the main targeting settings, ad formats, test images and headlines, and choose a strategy for impressions or clicks.
Preparation and terms
A bit of theory and numbers:
CTR is the ratio of clicks to impressions, measured as a percentage. For example, from 1000 impressions, you received 20 clicks. 20/1000 * 100 \u003d 2%. This indicator is important to consider when choosing an ad format for impressions. In per-click advertising, it is not that important because it does not affect the cost per click.
СPC - cost per transition. It is important to always take into account, otherwise you can go into the negative.
We create an advertising account
Open the "Settings" in the left menu and look for the "Advertising" link below.
Click on the "Targeted ad" button. Create ad. The first step is to create an ad, not an office. I propose to simply create an ad now, without setting any settings, just so that you have an ad account.
Cooking pictures
There are two options to choose from. The first is to look for pictures yourself on all the resources available to you (from photo banks to a banal search in pictures in a search engine), and then prepare pictures in Photoshop. Or you can use this mega-convenient service, for a start the free version will be enough. I will not dwell on the service now, if you want to figure it out, it is intuitive.
Testing images and titles
To customize your campaign more effectively, it is important to test images and headlines. For the test, we need to prepare. The test runs as follows.
- We select at least 5 images. We test five pictures with the same title.
- And we come up with at least 5 headings. We test five titles with the same picture.
- After you test which images and headings were the most clickable, combine the most clickable title and the most clickable image. This way we get the most effective ad.
Ideally, you need to test at least 15 pictures and 15 headlines. But for understanding the first time, five is enough.
Setting up
To date, there are 5 options for the ad format for the site and group.
- image and text. They are used mainly when you need to clearly explain what it is about in the announcement;
- great image. This format is good in that it attracts attention much better than the previous one. But there is a significant disadvantage - the limitation on symbols, only 25. You can also write text on the image, which significantly expands the capabilities of this option;
- Exclusive format. In this case, your ad will be broadcast to the user in a single copy, without competitors. The downside is that it is twice as expensive;
- Community promotion. This format is only suitable for communities; you cannot advertise the site using it. The key difference is that a user can join your community without following a link. There will be a button "Join" right in the ad;
- Finally, a special format! If your target audience is over 100 thousand, I recommend trying it! It is broadcast not in the left column, like other formats, but in the user's news feed, which significantly increases the CTR. This option also only works for communities.
Choosing the subject of your ad
You can skip this step in principle, but it is useful to choose a topic and subsection. When the topic and subsection are set, moderation is faster.
Choosing the geography of our target audience
In this block, you can select the cities you want to advertise to, districts, metro stations and even the streets of your city. This is necessary if you have a local business, such as a cafe. In this case, you need to tune in to a narrow circle of people who do not need to travel across half the city to you. Here you can also cut out irrelevant ads. For example, you are selling some rare commodity after purchasing it in China. In this case, it will be very useful to cut off large cities, since they already have a very good choice, and they may well buy the same product with delivery in their city, and even often cheaper. To do this, you need to select in the column “excluding” the cities that you want to exclude from your advertising campaign.
Setting up demographics
With gender and age, everything is clear. But there are very interesting settings in this block, such as birthday. We can tick the birthday box. And write in the ad, for example: "In honor of the birthday, a 10% discount." These ads increase click-through rates because we personalize them. By choosing marital status, you can also improve the relevance of your RK. For example, it makes no sense to advertise a dating site to family people. Well, at least often)
Interests
Well, finally we got there :) In my opinion, this is the most important and useful block in traditional targeting. Therefore, let's talk about it in as much detail as possible. So let's go.
Categories of interests
The Vkontatke algorithm constantly counts the engagement of each specific user in certain categories of posts. For example, if a person constantly likes, comments, views a specific topic, for example, goods and services. With the help of this setting, we will just be able to age our advertising to this segment of users! Great really ?! :)
Communities
We can tune in to a segment of the audience that is in the groups of our competitors! That is, in fact, take customers away from competitors. Well, that's not all! A person who is a member of communities of interest can also be our potential client (for example, people who are in business communities are potential clients for the b2b services industry). But here you need to carefully select the communities that you are tuning into.
App and website targeting
By targeting certain applications, you can also achieve good results in certain cases. For example, advertising a toy, you can target people who are already playing similar games.
An exception
You can, for example, exclude people who are already your subscribers.
Worldview
I do not use this block because there was no need. Perhaps it will be useful for you.
Travelers
If you check this box, the ads will be broadcast to people who tag their photos in different places. This increases the chances of finding a more solvent audience.
The next block "Education and work"
By tuning in to the profession, you can also additionally tune in to the audience who will be interested in your product or service. For example, people who studied for a high-paying specialty in one of the elite universities are much more likely to have a higher income than teachers in elementary grades. The same applies to people holding a certain position or working in a certain company.
Extra options
- Retargeting groups. This setting is worthy of a separate article. In short, you can collect a separate user base to which your ad will be broadcast. This can be done either with the help of certain software, or by pre-installing the retargeting code on your website.
- With the exception of. We can also exclude people on whom we do not want to show our ads. For example, people who are already subscribed to our community.
- Devices. If we choose here the owners of Apple technology or owners of smartphones, then we can even more accurately tune in to the solvent audience.
I usually ignore the rest of the settings in this block, simply because I haven’t come across such advertising campaigns yet.
Setting price and location
For impressions or for clicks?
We need to choose the price per impressions and per clicks. When properly configured, ads for impressions are often more effective than ads for clicks. But there are exceptions, for example, if your audience is over 500 thousand, it makes sense to test ads for clicks. I recommend choosing advertising platforms only on Vkontakte.
Transition cost.
The main mistake of beginners is that they leave the price that Vkontakte offers. That is why many consider Vkontakte advertising to be unreasonably expensive. In fact, you need to follow a simple formula: divide the proposed amount (clickthrough or per 1000 impressions) by about 10 or so. That is, if the price for 1000 impressions Vkontakte recommends 12 rubles, you can set 1.2 rubles. and if the impressions are unscrewed normally (at least 1 impression per second), then we leave it as it is. If not, we set the price a little higher, and so on until the impressions are unscrewed normally.
Click "Create ad", and then launch the ad for moderation.
Best regards, Vladimir Kondratenko
It might be useful to read:
- Bagiev gl tarasevich vm marketing;
- Forms and methods of work of cultural institutions of the club type The concept of club and club activities;
- Distribution channels for hotel services;
- Profession guide pros and cons;
- The specifics of marketing in tourism;
- Alexey kuskovbasis of tourism;
- Purpose and arrangement of the confectionery shop;
- Technology for preparing and conducting a tourist presentation;