Does advertising in contact work? Advertising campaign "VKontakte" from A to Z. Special offers in games from VKontakte

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. In the article "", we considered a number of options for attracting interested visitors (buyers) to our resource.

It is clear that without this, any project becomes meaningless, so everyone is trying to use these available funds to the maximum. We have already begun to talk in detail about, as well as about. In fact, these are wonderful tools that, with the right approach, can provide you with a good start.

But to complete the picture, it will still be necessary to use social media. They often open up completely new horizons and allow you to reach the audience interested in your products, which cannot be covered by traditional means. We have already started talking about and. However, the largest and most popular in Runet remained not covered by our attention.

What is Vkontakte targeting?

Many mistakenly consider the audience of the social network Vkontakte to be poorly convertible, because there, allegedly, mainly. Actually, yes, there is indeed a higher percentage of shkolota on Vkontakte than on Facebook, because there are many free goodies. But this does not mean at all that there is no solvent audience there - it is simply more blurred than in such social networks as Facebook, Google Plus or Linkedin.

However, the advertising targeting methods available on Vkontakte (setting only to the audience you need) and the relatively recent retargeting easily allow you to weed out network users who are not targeted for your offer. Let me explain a little about retargeting. It, in fact, makes it possible to show ads in Contact to users already familiar to you, whom you upload to your advertising account using a list of Email addresses, or phones, or IDs, or by collecting information about them on your site by setting a special code .

After the advent of retargeting in the settings of the Vkontakte advertising account, many even stopped using regular targeting. Moreover, how and where you collected a list of these Emails, phones or IDs is not important, but looking ahead I will say that for this purpose you can use scripts, online services and even applications for Contact. Everything works great, and you don't even need to. A little lower I will give examples of using retargeting, which will maximize the conversion of traffic from Contact and reduce the cost of an advertising campaign.

Actually, for those who do not know, blocks with targeted ads are displayed in the left column on the Contact pages (usually the ad consists of a title and an image, and in some cases a description may also be added to them):

Under them there is a button "All Ads", by clicking on which you can view the entire range of advertising topics that are offered to you. In theory, all of them should correspond to your interests and aspirations, but in practice this is far from always the case. In this and subsequent articles, we will just deal with minimizing the display of our ads to users who are not interested in them, as well as making them as interesting as possible for them in order to increase their click-through rate (CTR).

CTR (the ratio of views to the number of clicks multiplied by one hundred percent) in targeted advertising, as well as in contextual advertising, is used to evaluate the effectiveness of ads, and the higher it is, the less you will pay per click. Although, on Vkontakte you can choose between two types of payment:

Per clicks
For impressions

To understand which payment method will be the most profitable for you, you need to conduct experiments (test an advertising campaign with a modest budget - at least 100 rubles), by the way, in ninety percent of cases it will be more profitable to use the “per impressions” payment option, and only when trying to reach a huge according to the size of the audience, pay-per-clicks may be preferable. Below we will talk about this in a little more detail.

The “Per impressions” option will give you a lot of traffic for relatively small amounts, but with the proper skill. In the “Per clicks” option, it is quite difficult to achieve a low cost per click (you need a good CPA of ads), and it will be difficult to get a large number of clicks with this approach. Therefore, it is easier and, in most cases, it is cheaper to use the Vkontakte advertising option when paying for "Per impressions".

Let's quickly go over how to get yourself an advertising account on Vkontakte (by default, it is not active for you) and start creating an ad. Well, along the way, we'll talk about what you should pay attention to. Special attention, and what you can not bother with, because it does not greatly affect the success of an advertising campaign. So, at the bottom of any Contact page, you will find a button "Advertising". By clicking on it, you will be taken to the page for choosing which tool you want to use:

Here, by the way, the second sentence “Promotional posts in communities” is interesting. The fact is that Vkontakte could always be used for advertising purposes in two ways: either set up targeting in your official advertising account, or search for popular publics that suit your topics and offer their owners to publish your advertising post. In the latter case, Contact remained, as it were, out of business, which is why they stirred up such a thing (essentially, an exchange for placing records in public).

But we will talk about it later, because today we are only interested in targeted advertising and retargeting in particular. So we click on the button "Targeted Ads". In the window that opens, you will be briefly introduced to the features of the target, after which you just have to click on the "Create ad" button. A form will open with a lot of different fields (we'll talk about them a little later).

You can fill them out at random for now to create a test ad. Together with him will be created and your advertising account Vkontakte. After that, the "Advertising" tab will appear in your left menu, by which you can quickly enter this very office.

What is the difference between targeted advertising Vkontakte?

We will return to creating an ad, but for now I want to explain to you, How is targeted advertising different? from media or contextual advertising, and what is its feature.

In the case of using media advertising (banners, etc.), you pay for showing the ad to an audience that may include your target users. Their percentage, as a rule, will be very different from a hundred (much like a not very strong hit of television advertising in the audience). In this regard, targeting is much more selective. By fine-tuning, you can ensure that you pay only for the users you need (targeted and motivated, who are potentially interested in your offer).
In the case of using contextual advertising, it is linked to search queries, entered by the user in the search line (advertising in the issue), or binding to his recent interests (again, determined by previously entered requests) or to the content of the page on which the ad is shown (advertising on partner sites). Targeted advertising is tied to data that the system (in our case, Vkontakte) knows about the user - his geographical location, socio-demographic position, interests, and much more.

But this is not the main thing. Main the difference between contextual advertising and targeted advertising lies in the degree of readiness of a potential client to buy - whether he is ready to buy initially or you should encourage him to do so.

In contextual advertising, there are mainly so-called "warm customers". They enter the search, already having the goal of buying something (albeit not on the first site they come across, but in general), enter their request, conduct research on quality and price, after which they get from advertising to your site and become your customers .
(they came to Vkontakte in no case to buy, but to communicate), i.e. We show ads to users in order to arouse their interest. Then they need to be "warmed up".
1. For this purpose, they are used, in the case of goods that are not very expensive (when it is quite simple for a visitor to make a purchase decision). Such sales can be compared to trade in transport, when passengers decide to quickly buy only not very expensive goods. With regard to Contact, everything that costs less than a couple of thousand rubles can be attributed to the category of spontaneous purchases (clothing can be somewhat out of this price category).
2. Or you can send potential customers to the Contact community (), in the case of expensive or complex goods(services) when people need time to think. In the second case, you "process" visitors in the community, turning "cold" customers into "warm" ones. These are the so-called "long purchases" (expensive goods, complex services, events, etc.) that require reflection. It is in the community that you explain to him the importance of your offer, its features, uniqueness, merits, so that he is convinced of the need this purchase. It will not be difficult for him to join the community (if this topic is at least somehow interesting to him), after which he will start receiving your newsletter. It is possible that the process of "warming" (maturation) of users may take weeks or even months, but with the proper approach, everything will work out.

Where to send customers from advertising - to the site or to the community?

Once again we will fix - when to send the user from Vkontakte advertising to an external site, and when to the community?

If the advertised product costs less than 2000 rubles. In this case, it makes sense to lead the client to a landing (or one-pager)
If there is enough information on the landing page itself to persuade the client to buy (read about)
If the user does not need to pay - games, promo sites, etc.

If you have a large online store or a well-known brand. In this case, your need, most likely, will not be limited to one purchase - you need constant sales. In the community, you post interesting content that you dilute with selling posts about new products, offers or promotions. It will be much more convenient, far-sighted and practical.
If you have a local business (for example, a restaurant, fitness club or cafe). A person joins a community where you can communicate with him, find out his opinion about your service, read his reviews and try to take them into account. Well, of course, with a good community, this client can become a permanent one for you.
If you are selling complex or expensive products or services. In this case, with the help of the community, you will be able to explain to the user why this product costs so much money, why it is good and what is its advantage over competitors.

For whom is targeting suitable (advertising in VKontakte)?

If you have an offer suitable for a wide range of users (consumer goods). Things that are of interest to many. The wider your potential target audience, the better it will go on social media.
If you have your own thematic community on Vkontakte, then targeting can be a very good way to attract users and subscribers to it.
If you have an online store, then through social networks it is quite possible to successfully build sales. Vkontakte will give you new customers, new sales and additional profit compared to all other ways to attract customers.
Games and mobile applications work well through targeting, because it is very easy to set up ads for those who have mobile devices or those who play on social networks.
Cafes, restaurants, fitness, clubs and other local businesses almost always have their own representation in social networks, and attracting visitors from there using targeting would be a logical continuation of cooperation.
If you want to attract users to some events, concerts, parties and other events that are aimed at a wide audience, then Vkontakte is perfect for you.
Also in social networks, you can perfectly advertise various information products, seminars, conferences, coaching, etc. things.
To summarize, we can say that Vkontakte advertising works well for a customer-oriented business (and not a business for business).

For whom is Vkontakte advertising not suitable?

There are a number of service industries and businesses that are enough expensive and not very effective to promote using targeting in Vkontakte(context in this case may be preferable). Basically, the problem lies in the difficulty of selecting the right audience, although with the advent of retargeting (we will talk about it in great detail in subsequent articles), this problem has become quite solvable in some cases. The second problem is that most often people on social networks are not interested in these topics.

It is very difficult to promote Vkontakte (perhaps with the exception of Internet marketing). Those. targeting is not very suitable for B2B outside the Internet (sales of building materials, video surveillance systems, office supplies and everything else that is configured to work with a business that is not related to the Internet).

First, it is difficult to target suppliers for the right business, and even if it hits the right network user, it’s not a fact that he wants to change the supplier he already has. Secondly, suppliers are also people and they go to Contact to take a break from work, and not continue to do it. If he needs your service, he will go to Yandex or Google and find everything there. Internet marketers actually work in the social network, so landing pages, etc. You can advertise things on Vkontakte with success.

Go hard complex highly specialized services(data protection, alarm systems, etc.), which are incomprehensible to most Vkontakte users. It will be quite difficult to find the target audience who will be interested in it. The more complex the service, the more difficult it is to find an audience on the social network. Although, again, with the advent of retargeting, it has become possible to allocate an audience for highly specialized offers, but some difficulties still remain.
Difficult to promote by targeting medical services , because there are a lot of nuances for each of their types, primarily related to the passage of moderation (you need to collect and send information about your activities and coordinate such announcements in every possible way). In addition, the cost of attracting a client may be higher than in the context, which is not good. Secondly, again, it is difficult to target (select) the target audience, although you can focus on some thematic medical communities. But then again, the users of these communities are already "addicted" to the services of that medical center, which this community has created and maintains. There must be a good reason for users to change benchmarks (for example, if your offer will have a significantly lower price). Services in cosmetology medicine (plastic, etc.) are moving a little better, because this is more interesting to the people.
Quite often they try to promote with targeting real estate, but this is far from always effective, because it is incredibly difficult to find a buyer for an apartment using targeted advertising on Vkontakte. You will need to reach a huge audience to get a chance at at least one sale. Moreover, nothing special can be done except for setting up for megacities and solvent age. A more promising method for selling real estate would be to create a thematic community or conduct seminars (for example, about mortgages, or how to buy an apartment), but this will require a lot of work and add work to you. Things are better with the delivery and rental of apartments through targeting.

The above facts in no way beg the merits of any of the above methods of advertising, they simply illustrate their significant differences. The social network Vkontakte, due to its specificity, aggregates a huge layer of knowledge about the users who are registered and communicate in it. It is thanks to this that, with the proper skill, it is possible only for those network users who, a priori, will be interested in it. Well, with the advent of the possibility of using retargeting, the accuracy of targeting the user has become even higher.

In VKontakte, goods and services worth up to five to six thousand rubles are sold well. Everything that is more expensive can be tried, but the likelihood of effective sales to the audience of this social network is already declining.
In addition, it is worth saying that it is best to sell consumer goods here. With the advent of retargeting, advertising of highly specialized offers has also become quite possible and effective, but it’s easier to sell consumer goods.
If a product, service or brand has a community of fans on Vkontakte, then this will be a great help, because targeting by groups works best.
As a rule, it is better to direct the flow of visitors attracted from targeted advertising to an external site (or your site) than to a group or public in the social network itself. But again, you need to experiment.
The prices for advertising on Vkontakte are somewhat higher than on Vkontakte, but here you can very quickly (with the right approach) get a decent flow of interested visitors, which will result in dozens of orders for inexpensive goods per day. There is an example when the owner of an online store spends two hundred thousand rubles a month on targeted advertising and is very pleased with the margin extracted from this business.

Ad moderation and basic advertising campaign parameters

In addition, you should know that (for example, alcohol, tobacco and other filth). Well, everything else that is prohibited by Russian law. Actually, all your ads will be moderated and forbidden topics will not be missed, but if you are contracting for someone to attract traffic from Vkontakte, then check out

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. Choosing marital status, you can also improve the relevance of your advertising campaign. 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

Hello friends! In this post, I will tell you how to create effective advertisements for contextual advertising on Vkontakte. I have mentioned this tool more than once in my articles, so it's time to talk about the principle of working with it.

You are probably used to hearing that only search engines have contextual advertising, but recently social networks have also acquired such a feature, which, by the way, shows itself well. contextual advertising Vkontakte allows you to promote both external sites and groups, meetings, publics. The coolest thing about this tool is targeting. The setting is very flexible, you can customize the display to the exact street, interests and even browsers. Also, with such a large audience (80,000,000 people per day), the price for advertising is relatively low, and you can start a campaign with an amount of 100 rubles. Here's what the ad units look like on the pages of the contact itself:

Agree, it looks more like teasers than context. Yes, and the picture plays an important role here. Also, a significant plus is that you can pay for ads both for impressions and for clicks. For impressions, by the way, it turns out much more profitable, then I will explain why.

Cons of the contact context in a small number of characters in the title (it's very difficult, you know, to hook a person using only 25 characters). I also find image moderation too strict (sometimes it is very difficult to push the desired image, which will surely bring more clicks). Well, in general, everything is pretty good, and it definitely makes sense to work in this direction. Okay, enough theory, let's start creating an advertising campaign.

We create an advertising campaign. We determine the payment, compose advertising headlines and images

Let's move on to the targeting ad page and click "create an ad":

On the next page you will see the settings for the new ad, the first step is to select the type of payment:

Pay Per Click – You pay for every real click a person makes. By choosing this type of payment, you can add a 25-character title, a 60-character description, and a 90x65 pixel image to your ad:

Pay per impression- everything is much more interesting here. Payment occurs for every 1000 impressions, and the ad can be shown several times to the same user. In this case, everything depends on your imagination, creativity, as well as properly configured targeting. My practice of working with contact ads has shown that when you pay for impressions, you can get more clicks for a lower price. However, in any case, I advise you to test 2 campaigns - with impressions and clicks. By choosing this type of payment, you can add a title of 25 characters to your ad, as well as a 90x120 pixel image:

Promotion of communities for clicks- such a function appeared recently, and to be honest, I did not use it. This payment method is intended for advertising groups, meetings, publics and applications. You pay for each unique user transition. When choosing this type of payment, you can add a 25-character title and a 90x90 pixel image to your ad:

So, I choose to pay per impression, but the tips below can be used for all types of ads. Now our main task is to create a headline combined with a picture that will attract the attention of users and encourage them to click.

Let me remind you that the title should consist of 25 characters, which means that we need to briefly convince the person to click on the ad. The simplest technique is a call to action. Let's say we advertise an online game about dragons, then the headline could be: "Fight the dragon!", "Crush the dragon!", "Defeat the dragon!". I hope you get the gist.

You can also use titles like: “The best game of 2013!”, “This is better than Skyrim!”, “The coolest game of 2013!” etc. In general, you are only limited by your imagination.

Next, you need to choose a picture that will attract people. Since we are advertising a game about dragons, you can take pictures from the Skyrim game (if you don’t know, you can google this topic) or just pick up a beautiful picture with a dragon. It is desirable to give preference to light pictures. So, here's what I got:

After we have compiled a headline and selected a picture, it's time to move on to the most important part of the advertising campaign - targeting. Before doing this, do not forget to select the type of advertising (site, group, application):

Targeting for Vkontakte ads

Proper targeting setting target audience) is the key to the success of the entire advertising campaign, so this matter must be taken very seriously. To begin with, I would like to show with examples how, due to an incorrectly selected target audience, they merge into a pipe advertising budgets. Here are a few ads that are spinning on my page:

The page is real, it contains only real data, real place of residence, and now we will look at the main problems of these two ads (they all come with pay-per-clicks).

First ad - photographer Mikhail Bolotov, wedding photos, family photo shoots, south of Russia. The group is advertised. The laugh is that I live in Ukraine, and not in Russia, and I’m still 17 years old and it’s still too early for me to get married ... Plus, it seems to me that the title of the ad is very strange - “photographer Mikhail Bolotov”, I never talk about this I heard…

The second announcement is Apartment renovation in Moscow and the region. An external site is being advertised. Again - I'm a 17-year-old kid, why the hell did I give up on repairing an apartment, and even in Moscow (I live in Ukraine) ?! When I go to the site, I find that it is built on the Ucoz engine in the style of oblique, crooked, just to be alive ...

Those. we see that the ads are shown to the wrong audience, which means that the money is wasted.

Now let's move on to targeting. As an example, we will advertise the online game "Dragons". On the ad settings page, we find the “geography” section:

Here we select the country and cities in which we want to broadcast ads. For the game “Dragons”, I choose the country Russia. I leave the “cities and regions” field empty, since it doesn’t matter to me from which city the registration will be carried out.

I choose male gender, because I think that games are mainly a male hobby. Age is also an important parameter. Here you need to start from what exactly you will advertise. For example, if advertised offer, then you need to understand that you should not expect much from an audience under 18, since it is insolvent. If entertainment is advertised (as in our case), then an audience of up to 18-20 years old is just more suitable, since mostly young people like to have fun. In our case, I put the age from 12 to 20 years, as an online game is advertised. The fields "birthday" and "marital status" are not so important.

The next graphs that I would like to pay attention to are interests, groups, applications and sites:

First you need to probe your audience by interests as much as possible. To advertise the game, I put the interests of the game, online games, dragons (since we advertise the game of the same name), Skyrim (since this game is associated with dragons) and for the experiment I prescribed the cartoon “How to Train Your Dragon”. For your advertisements, you also try to probe the audience as much as possible. For example, if Seo services are advertised, then website promotion, blogging, website development, seo, etc. can be crammed into interests. Hope you get the gist.

Next come the columns “categories of groups” and “communities”, with the help of which you can attract an additional audience from groups and contact publics. Just select groups similar in subject matter to your offer. It's the same with websites and apps, for our game I chose the following apps:

If you are going to advertise for recruitment (for example, in Moscow), then the “extended geography” section may be useful to you, where you can specify districts, metro stations or a street.

I also advise you to look at the tab “ additional settings” and select the most popular browsers there:

Here I advise you to leave Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. We screen out phones and Internet Explorer, because no one will click on your ad while sitting on the phone, and, in my opinion, Internet Explorer is used only by those who have recently acquired a computer and absolutely do not understand anything about it.

The last step is to set the cost per click or 1000 impressions, it can be reduced to 30% of the recommended one:

I also advise you to check the box next to "limit" to 100 impressions per person.

Where is VK advertising placed.

To see what different ad formats look like, just open your page.

Teasers.

On the left on the pages of users there are teaser VK targeting blocks, three in one display

Blocks in the news feed.

In the feed, your post is diluted with news posts by users in the ratio of 1/25, and does not differ from them in any way, except for the note that this is an advertising post. Such posts consist of text of any length and, if desired, pictures.

VK groups.

In VKontakte communities, you can buy advertising space and place posts of various formats - both text with pictures and video clips. Here the message is also marked with a footnote and this is the only way it can be distinguished from the records of the members or the administration of the group. Here's what it looks like in the group feed

How targeted advertising works on VKontakte.

I won’t describe how to set up a campaign with targeting in VK, you can see it in the article on the site, now we’ll analyze appearance ads, and how they are promoted.

Blocks of targeted advertising on VKontakte can be created with either a small or a large picture (its dimensions are visible in the screenshot). In the first case, a title of 33 characters and a description of 70 characters are written under the image, in the second, only the title.

Moderators carefully monitor the spelling, the presence of extra exclamation marks and the information content of the texts, and often return the ad for revision. So be careful.

How is the campaign being rolled out?

When setting up payment for 1000 impressions, a limit is set for showing an ad unit to 1 user, the minimum number is 100. That is, one person will not see it more than 100 times.

This is important, because the click-through rate (CTR) depends on the ratio of clicks to impressions and the success of the compiled teaser block is evaluated, and if some ad is constantly spinning for one user, this indicator will be small and not correspond to the true situation.

Payment for impressions is set up when the target audience is narrowed using targeting filters and does not have a very large reach. If you don’t present a portrait of the target audience for your offer, don’t know how to segment it and reach a large one, it makes sense to set up pay per clicks.

In the first case, amounts will be debited from your account as impressions are made based on the bid you set, in the second case, as clicks are made, and also based on the set bid.

VK ads in the block on the left are regularly rotated, that is, yours will not be displayed constantly, but in turn.

Advertising in the news feed.

Here, the ads look like any other message, this is the so-called. Initially, this format involves the promotion of posts from your community, but you can make a new post directly from the advertising account, but on behalf of the group administrator.

The difference is that you can write text without limiting characters, insert pictures and videos. How to set up such a campaign, see the article on the site.

Your post moves down the feed as new entries are added and will hang there for a long time, but hardly anyone will look for it at the bottom, so choose the most visited time for your target audience to post them.

In groups and publics, there are no restrictions on the format of an advertising post, if it has not been set by the administrator, which you can find out from him.

You also agree on the time of placement and learn about the rules of promotion. Usually it looks like this: after publication, the post is at the very top of the community news for one hour, and then creeps down during the day as new posts appear or other similar offers are posted. After a day, the message is removed from the feed.

But this is not a rule, in some groups administrators arrange a different display schedule, and sometimes a post generally remains in the feed for an indefinite time.

Recently, during consultations, I have been increasingly asked about targeted advertising on Vkontakte.

Ok, today let's analyze a detailed algorithm using a live example and see how it works. I will say right away - if you read my article diagonally, casually skimming through your eyes, nothing will work. You need to go step by step and when setting up your VKONTAKTE advertisement, check with each step.

Stage one: what goods and services can be promoted with targeted advertising on Vkontakte?

1) Costing no more than $ 150 - this is a proven practice, the price limit. Is your item more expensive? Until you try, you won’t know, but from experience, what is more expensive than the indicated price is much more difficult and converts worse.

2) Targeted advertising can ONLY sell consumer goods or services. If the product, service, brand being sold has fan groups, communities, VKONTAKTE publics, it makes sense to try. If there are no obvious adherents, you can not try to advertise. Seminars on currency regulation and metal fittings definitely WILL NOT GO (this was also discussed recently).

Stage two: what should be kept in mind when creating a VKontakte advertising campaign?

1) The key to the success of targeted advertising - right choice target audience. You must know your consumer in person! There are no trifles when determining target audience! Having missed the definition of one point, you can drain the budget. For example, if the main consumers of your product are in the age group from 30 to 40 years old, and you decide to expand the range by ten years from 20 to 40 (“what if it works?”), Consider that the effectiveness of the ad has already decreased three times. Since users from 20 to 30 years old on Vkontakte are three times more than from 30 to 40, they will view your ad more often, but there will be no sense (conversions) from these views.

2) Set spending limits. I don’t really like that VKONTAKTE can’t make a schedule of impressions, like contextual advertising, but you can and should limit the budget in all available ways.

3) Be mindful of the timing of impressions. It is almost useless to advertise something at night or early in the morning. Shows will be. Perhaps there will even be clicks. There will be no conversion.

4) Test every ad. A test is a display of a fresh ad with a very small limit. 100 rubles for a new ad is enough to understand whether it works or not.

A little about a personal method for evaluating the effectiveness of a targeted ad in VK. com

We merge 100 rubles of the budget, look at the CTR of the ad:

if above 0.2% - good announcement
if within 0.1-0.2% - needs improvement (changes in title or description)
everything below 0.1% - in the basket

Stage three: fine tuning targeted advertising VKontakte.

I will tell you on a personal example of the current VKontakte advertising campaign. I advertise seasonal children's clothing - jackets, suits, overalls. The campaign leads to one CPA offer. This is a relatively inexpensive product, it is in seasonal demand, plus I have a one-year-old son and the concerns of the target audience in the person of his mother, I know very well 🙂 .

a)Standard setup start

b)Upload an image, come up with a title and text

A few nuances:

The headline is always a call to action!
Description text - reveals the essence of your offer
The picture is 80% of the technical success of each specific ad (as in a teaser ad). It is better to spend an extra 10 minutes looking for a picture with a wow effect than to waste your budget.

c)Targeting settings

In this case, about geography, demography and marital status, I know exactly what to indicate, because. part is known from personal experience, a part is directly indicated on the offer page of the online store.

Attention: if, for example, you can define for your product that half of the customers are from Omsk and Novosibirsk, and the other half are from other cities of the Russian Federation, then indicate only these two cities and no more.

The principle of concentration clearly applies here, which also works for all other targeting parameters (age, gender, marital status, interests, etc.). Your task is to collect the cream of your target audience and shoot at the top ten, and not hope that maybe a sixty-year-old man from Kukuevsk will come in and buy a winter jacket for his grandson as a gift. Won't go! Will not make it! Your budget will run out much sooner...

We think, we think and we think! In what communities can mommies be, to whom we sell winter jackets, what keywords can be used to find them in the search on Vkontakte communities.

Search example:

I emphasize again: you need to go through all the targeting points, think about each and “lick” each one. IN this announcement I didn't set up things like Apps & Sites, Worldview, Education, etc. these items are not needed here. But, in each case, the setting may be different: good cameras it is advisable to offer photographers an information product on esotericism - people with higher education, and new phones for students and high school students. Little things in this issue no.

e) Audience and rates

The minimum audience for a targeted ad test is 20,000 people or more. If the target audience is less, this is bad, because. ads will be shown to the same people more times, which will lead to a drop in CTR. More is great, the main thing is to try to capture non-target users as little as possible.

In my example ad, it looks like this:

An audience of more than 50,000 is normal.

About suggested price: in the screenshot, the recommended price for the “per impressions” setting, that is, for 1000 impressions, it is recommended to set such a price. I usually set it to about the middle of the recommended range. On the net you can find a lot of advice that setting for impressions is unprofessional and wrong, and the price can be set much lower than the recommended one ... who to believe is up to you. I would not trust anyone (including the author of this article :)), but I tested and verified everything from my own experience. Personally, I work for impressions and bid on targeted VKontakte ads in this way, because:

1) A bad ad will not gain CTR, even for clicks, even for impressions. If the CTR is low, you need to work on the image, headline, text, targeting conditions, but the payment method has nothing to do with it.

2) Setting the payment method "for impressions" allows you to get really targeted visitors from VKONTAKTA much cheaper than with ANY other type of advertising. I have some statistics on various offers and you can believe it or not, but a normal “live” transition on average 3-4 rubles in a product topic with fierce competition cannot be obtained anywhere else.

3) If you try to save money and set the price below the recommended one, the CTR of even a very good ad will start to fall very quickly. Who does not know what CTR is. As a result, there will be no savings, and a good ad can be easily screwed up.

Last tweak: Don't forget to check the "Limit to 100 impressions per person" checkbox. If the user has not clicked after 100 views, it is logical that he will not click after 1000, apparently he is simply not interested in your ad.

Step Four: Save the ad, click "run" and it goes to moderation. VKONTAKTE moderation is usually very fast, from a few minutes to a couple of hours.

After that, the show will start. After a test of 100 rubles of the budget, we evaluate ads and leave them to work, only those that exceeded the CTR of 0.2%

If everything is done correctly, in the VKONTAKTA statistics in a few hours you can see the following numbers:

And in the sales statistics a few hours later, these are:

100% in retail- quite a normal result.

That's all for today :).

If you registered using my referral link, started working and tested ads for at least 100 USD, but something doesn’t work for you, you can knock on my mail [email protected] and I will try to tell you for free (if it is in my competence).

For all other cases, the consultation conditions are described on the page

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