Vkontakte advertising campaign. What is Vkontakte targeting and how to set it up: a guide for beginners. Ad moderation and basic advertising campaign parameters
Two facts. First: VKontakte is the most popular social network in Runet. Secondly, there are a lot of anti-cases on the Internet 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 features of the VKontakte advertising account, so that even a beginner can set up effective targeting.
Where to begin?
Decide on the 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, select the options for placing ads. Will you advertise your VKontakte community, or attract users to the site to make a conversion.
Next, create an overall budget for advertising campaign. Also, be sure to set a test budget, as you cannot launch a campaign without a test. First you need to check the 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 pays for 1000 impressions);
- CR is the conversion rate.
Two formulas can be used to calculate the budget, depending on what type of payment you will be using:
- Budget = Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM) / 1000 x Impressions.
- Budget = cost per click (CPC) x number of clicks.
Where can I get the necessary CTR to calculate? If this is your first campaign, use the average value for VKontakte (0.03% for teasers, slightly higher for the feed). In the future, take the arithmetic average of the campaigns carried out.
You can also use these formulas for calculations:
- Impressions = Clicks / CTR.
- CTR = clicks / impressions.
- Clicks = Impressions x CTR.
- Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) = budget / number of impressions x 1000.
- Cost per click (CPC) = budget / number of clicks.
- CR (conversion rate) = number of conversions / number of clicks.
Consider an example:
You say that advertising on VKontakte does not work well: some schoolchildren click on 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 target Vkontakte in order to show ads to the right people.
Performance marketing from TexTerra - we are responsible for our work and bring new customers. You pay only for the result.
How VKontakte targeting works
Imagine that you are advertising auto repair services in Smolensk. You can display ads in the most popular VKontakte communities and wait for a response. If the ad says "Car repair in Smolensk", customers will surely turn to 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 who do not have a car. Moreover, you are pumping money into advertising services for people who drive expensive non-breaking foreign cars. And you specialize in the repair of domestic cars, and you have direct deliveries of spare parts from AvtoVAZ.
In order to spend funds efficiently and close deals, you must show ads only to residents of Smolensk who have a car. It is desirable that the ads be seen by people with not very new cars, which are suitable for spare parts from AvtoVAZ. This problem can be solved by targeting the target audience.
With the help of targeting, you practically exclude inappropriate ad impressions. For example, don't spend money advertising a Pattaya holiday to schoolchildren who are still interested in football and puppets, and not walks along Walking Street. Targeting ads brings the following benefits:
- Increase response: clicks and deals.
- Cost reduction.
- Reducing the cost of customer acquisition.
- Preventing negative user reactions to inappropriate advertising.
- Show ads to audiences of competitors.
With the help of this guide, you will learn how to target an audience on VKontakte.
How to properly target Vkontakte
Choose an ad format: Image & Text, Large Image, Promote Communities.
Enter a title and text, upload an image, select a theme. If necessary, you can set an age limit for impressions. On the this stage don't waste too much time on these things. The task 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 buyer persona method. You can also read about it.
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 contacted by female office managers between the ages of 20 and 50 years. Another group of clients - IT people large companies, 70% of whom are men. Their age also ranges from 20 to 50 years.
How to set up geographic targeting
Target the audience groups suggested above. First, select the geography of ad impressions. Set as target Krasnoyarsk region and exclude Zheleznogorsk.
How to set up demographic targeting
As mentioned above, your potential clients include women who work as office managers, as well as men and women who work in IT departments. Therefore, in the "Gender" section, leave the default value. Choose male or female only if you are selling a clearly male or female product, such as spinning rods or color cosmetics. Keep in mind that in this case, too, you cut off potential customers, for example, women who are fond of fishing.
Specify the age of the audience. Under the terms of the experiment, we agreed to target customers aged 20 to 50 years. This is a wide age range, so specify it unchanged in the settings. If the age of most customers is in a narrow range, such as 25-30 years old, try expanding your target group. Specify the age from 22 to 33 years old and evaluate the results of the campaign.
If necessary, limit the audience of impressions to birthday people.
Skip the "Marital Status" menu. Use it only in exceptional cases, for example, if you sell gifts for Valentine's Day.
When and how to use interest and interest category targeting
In interest targeting, you can select audience segments. These are users who are currently interested in a particular product and are ready to buy it. For example, an advertiser may show ads to people who frequently shop online, look after a car, or are interested in financial services. VKontakte classifies users into audience segments based on 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 ink cartridge refill ads to members of all related communities in the selected region.
To find suitable communities, use the VKontakte search. You can change the search criteria using the filter.
Also use the allsocial.ru service, 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 solved using the "Apps and Sites" filter. Enter the name of the site of interest and save the options suggested by the system. At this stage, you can evaluate the potential reach and the feasibility of targeting the audience according to the selected attribute.
If necessary, block any sites or applications from being shown to users using the "Exclude" 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 the target audience by education only if you are interested in graduates of specific educational institutions. You can also target users who have recently graduated from an educational institution.
Use position targeting as a last resort and very carefully. This method of targeting can greatly narrow the audience or add untargeted people to it. First, not all users indicate the position. Secondly, the target audience can be people who indicate all the places of work on the page.
For example, filter the audience by position if you want to show ads specific specialists. For example, use this type of targeting if you sell dental equipment. Keep in mind that ads will not be seen by dentists who have not indicated their profession in their profile.
How to use retargeting
Users who are 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 appropriate menu in the VKontakte advertising account. Click the Create Audience button.
You can create an audience using a 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 uploaded information or use these suggestions:
- Use a CSV or TXT file.
- Write to one address, id or phone number per line. You can also write data to a string separated by commas or semicolons. You can find out the user id using applications.
- Specify the phone number in the following formats: +71111111111, 71111111111, 8-111-111-11-11.
You can also install a retargeting code on the site. In the "Pixels" menu, generate a pixel.
Copy the code and paste it on the site.
If the site is powered by WordPress, it is convenient to insert the code using the Head, Footer and Post Injections plugin.
Use the Edit menu to add/remove an audience or get the retargeting code again.
After populating your retargeting audience, create ads and launch your ad campaign.
What services increase the effectiveness of Vkontakte targeting
With the help of external services, you can improve the accuracy of target audience targeting and make advertising more effective. Pay attention to the following sites:
- Cerebro. This is one of the most popular and effective external services for managing VKontakte advertising. Targeting with Cerebro provides the following options: searching for an audience and a similar audience, highlighting active users of groups and publics, targeting potential customers who interacted with individual VKontakte posts, searching for thematic communities, targeting user friends, and others.
- Pepper. Read about the possibilities of the service in our review.
- Allsocial. Using the service, you can search for thematic communities. Allsocial also quickly looks up group admins and tracks group changes, such as name changes.
- Spotlight (free). Collects data of group members, targets users by different types activity, such as liking certain posts or groups. Also finds contacts of group administrators. To use the service, you must log in via account"In contact with".
- Segmento target (paid). Using this service, you can target the audience of VKontakte communities. The system also works with Facebook, Odnoklassniki and Instagram.
- OnlyTalk (free). Using this platform, you can manage Vkontakte advertising campaigns, including determining target audiences.
To increase the effectiveness of advertising, it is necessary 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 appropriate retargeting groups.
Audience targeting is available in ad automation services such as Aori , Plarin , Sociate.Targeting . Targeting capabilities are standard here, but automation systems provide advertisers with the ability to simultaneously manage advertising campaigns on several 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 brief 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 of transitions 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 advertising campaign lies in fine tuning targeting. The audience for ad impressions was determined by gender, age, and regions of residence.
- The author of the Sofa Theorist blog, Mikhail Bursin, gained very valuable experience in using Vkontakte targeting. The system showed the ad to the same people, due to which the effectiveness of advertising was low. 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 cost the advertiser less.
- 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 check out the big
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 account there is an opportunity to launch special company to advertise in other people's news. What is news and how to set it up? You will find the answer to this question in this detailed guide..
- When promoting goods and services worth from 4000 rubles.
- During the promotion of complex niches: real estate, legal services, construction.
- Working with a cold audience that needs to be told in more detail about the project.
Advantages and disadvantages
- Ability to create records with large text accompaniment.
- The tape looks more natural. This increases the reach of your ads.
- Most effective method promotion Vkontakte.
- The recording is available for distribution on all devices.
- Inability to pay for transfers.
Starting Instructions: 7 Steps
Without further ado, let's list the 7 basic steps.
Step #1.
Step #2
Click on the "Create ad" button.
Step #3
Step #4
The feed is published on behalf of your community.
Step #5
Select the topic of the ad.
Advertising products for a specific age category need to put a special label.
Step #6
Setting up the target audience. Select the desired country or countries, city.
The item "Birthday" is useful when promoting products as a gift.
In the next section, specify the category of interests of the target audience. For example, when advertising women's clothing, you can specify "Beauty and Fashion", "Buy Online", "Home and Family", etc.
In communities, indicate publics and groups related to your topic.
Applications and websites. We indicate Vkontakte applications or third-party sites related to the topic of the advertisement.
The item "Travelers" shows entries to users who often visit Vkontakte from different IPs.
Education and work. If your the target audience- students or representatives of some profession, then this tab will be very useful.
Extra options. Here you can add your base retargeting, collected from your website or using parsers.
Save setting. Here you can add the audience that showed any actions with your ads to the retargeting database. 
Step #7
Set price and location. In the "Ads" section, choose where the posts 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 needs to be reduced to save the budget. If coverage will fall, 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 news ads: 3 tips
- Tailor your ads to each audience segment.
- Choose bright and catchy images.
- Show ads on web and mobile devices separately.
Segment your audience. No need to run one advertising 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 be selected and which should be ignored, given my individual project? How to choose images? Which image format is best? 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 tried! Targeted ads don't work! I spent a lot of money." Dear comrades, the violin will not play in the hands of a hippopotamus! Tried - it did not work, does not mean at all that it does not work. So somewhere they made a mistake. Thousands of companies on Vkontakte use this tool and get clients every day. It just takes a little patience and skill.
In the meantime, here's 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 speed of converting a visitor into a buyer. But in most cases, it is better to start with contextual advertising, and only then connect targeted advertising. And using a bunch of contextual advertising + Vkontakte targeting will help to significantly increase efficiency. I will talk about this in the next article, because now it will be difficult to tell you about all the subtleties, but I will give you some guidelines. So, let's begin.
To make it easier to navigate, we conditionally divide the whole process into 2 stages. Namely:
- Training: basic terms, preparation for testing ads, creating an advertising account.
- Customization: let's go through the main targeting settings, by formats advertisement, compiling a test of pictures and headlines, and also choose strategies for impressions or clicks.
Preparation and terms
Some 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 = 2%. This indicator is important to consider when choosing a display ad format. When advertising per click, it is not so important, because. it does not affect CPC.
CPC - cost per transition. It is important to always take into account, otherwise you can go into the red.
We create an advertising account
Open the menu on the left "Settings" and at the bottom we look for the link "Advertising".
Click on the "Targeted Ad" button. "Create Ad". The first step is to create an ad, not an account. I suggest just creating an ad now, without setting any settings, just so that you have an ad account.
cooking pictures
You can choose two options. The first is to look for pictures yourself on all the resources available to you (from photobanks to a banal image search in a search engine), and then prepare pictures in Photoshop. Or you can use this mega convenient service, for starters, the free version will be enough. I will not dwell on the service now, if you wish, you will understand it, it is intuitive.
Testing images and headings
To set up a campaign more effectively, it is important to test images and headlines. For the test, we need to prepare. The test goes as follows.
- Choose at least 5 pictures. We test five pictures with the same title.
- And come up with at least 5 headings. We test five headings with the same picture.
- After you test which images and headings were the most clickable, we combine the most clickable heading 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 for the first time, five is enough.
Setting
To date, there are 5 options for advertising format for the site and group.
- image and text. They are used mainly when you need to clearly explain what it is about right in the ad;
- big image. This format is good because it attracts attention much better than the previous one. But there is a significant disadvantage - the character limit is only 25. You can also write text on the image, which significantly expands the possibilities 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 the user will be able to join your community without clicking on the link. Right in the ad there will be a "Join" button;
- And 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.
Choose an ad topic
You can basically skip this step, but it is useful to choose a topic and subsection. When the subject 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 in, 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 halfway through the city to you. Here you can also cut off irrelevant ads. For example, you sell some rare product, having previously purchased it in China. In this case, it will be very useful to cut off large cities, because. they have a very good choice, and they may well buy the same product with delivery in their city, and often cheaper. To do this, you need to select in the "exclude" column 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 a birthday. We can tick the birthday box. And write in the ad, for example: "In honor of the birthday, a 10% discount." Such ads increase click-through rate, because. we personalize them. By choosing your marital status, you can also improve the relevance of your AC. For example, it makes no sense to advertise a dating site for family people. Well, at least often)
Interests
Well, we finally got there :) In my opinion, this is the most important and useful block in traditional targeting. So let's talk about it in as much detail as possible. So let's go.
Interest categories
The Vkontakte algorithm constantly counts the involvement 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 this setting, we will be able to target our ads for this segment of users! It's good right? :)
Communities
We can tune in to an audience segment that is in our competitor groups! That is, in fact, take away customers 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 members of business communities are potential clients for the sphere of b2b services). But here you need to carefully select the communities that you tune in to.
App and website targeting
By targeting specific applications, you can also achieve good results in certain cases. For example, by advertising a toy, you can target people who already play similar games.
An exception
You can, for example, exclude people who are already your subscribers.
outlook
I do not use this block, because there was no need. Perhaps it will be useful for you.
Travelers
If you check this box, then ads will be broadcast to people who tag their photos in different places. Which increases the chances of finding a more solvent audience.
The next block "Education and work"
By tuning in to professions, you can also additionally tune in to an audience that will be interested in your product or service. For example, people who studied for a highly paid specialty in one of the elite universities are much more likely to have a high income than teachers. lower 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 first installing the retargeting code on your site.
- With the exception of. We can also exclude people we don't want to show our ads to. For example, to people who are already subscribed to our community.
- Devices. If we choose owners of Apple equipment or owners of smartphones here, then we can even more accurately tune in to a solvent audience.
I usually ignore the rest of the settings in this block, simply because I have not yet come across such advertising campaigns.
Setting price and location
For impressions or for transitions?
We need to choose a price for impressions and for 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 above 500 thousand, it makes sense to test ads for clicks. I recommend choosing advertising platforms only on Vkontakte.
Transfer cost.
The main mistake of beginners is that they leave the price offered by Vkontakte. That is why many consider Vkontakte advertising unreasonably expensive. In fact, you need to be guided by a simple formula: divide the proposed amount (transition or per 1000 impressions) by about 10 or so. That is, if Vkontakte recommends a price of 12 rubles for 1000 impressions, you can set 1.2 rubles. and if the impressions will be 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 turn off normally.
Click "Create ad", and then run the ad for moderation.
Sincerely, Vladimir Kondratenko
It might be useful to read:
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- Most Effective Advertising;
- Selling on eBay: Listing an item for sale;
- What to do if there is an exclamation mark on the Android screen (how to fix);
- Decline on simultaneously open connections;
- A quick way to create a presentation on a computer;
- Create like Leonardo da Vinci;
- DohVinci, a set for creativity: description, types, composition and reviews;