Publication date: 09 Apr 2019

There is something new about contextual advertising nearly every month, and it might get hard to keep an eye on all changes. To launch successful ad campaigns is, however, nearly impossible if you are failing to stay up to date. We offer you to have a look at the most interesting changes that took place in Yandex.Direct from September 2018 to February 2019.

• Case from 3snet: How to deliver Yandex.Direct to gambling

New strategy “Manual bid management with optimization in ad networks”

The new strategy still suggests manual bidding, like the previous strategy did, but now the system analyzes which clicks might result in conversions and adjusts bids automatically within specified budget.

That means the entry threshold gets lower for new advertisers. Moreover, with the new automated algorithms ad campaigns will have higher conversion rates within specified budget and, therefore, become more effective.

New “Direct Commander”

Direct.Commander now looks like a comprehensive tool with many useful features allowing advertisers to make corrections or mass changes, manage bids, or deal with image ads. Experts, however, say that Direct.Commander is still inferior to its alternatives introduced by other companies: one cannot manage all types of campaigns (media campaigns, smart banners, etc.) in Direct.

New features added to Turbo pages

In September 2018, Yandex added a number of new features to its Turbo pages. Turbo Page technology allows creating the light version of mobile pages in the Turbo Page Builder. Turbo pages load fast even with a slow internet connection.

The updated version of Turbo pages has the following new features:

• ratings;
• gallery of media content with a slider;
• new designs of the “You may find it interesting” block;
• interlinking between Turbo pages;
• goals in metrics for Turbo pages;
• updated sidebar with a page menu;
• anchor links on Turbo pages;
• site search form;
• possibility to view images;
• possibility to add content from Yandex.Maps and Yandex.Music.

Video ads: new type of ads in Yandex.Direct

It is a special type of ads in text and graphic campaigns. Advertisers can either create a separate campaign with video ads only or set a separate strategy, budget limits, and bids for this type of ads in an already running campaign. What differs video ads from video extensions is that they can have their own title and text and, therefore, are not bound with already running ads.

Video extensions have made it easier to buy traffic from the Video network as now both standalone creatives and entire ad campaigns can be created to attract traffic. Moreover, it has got more comfortable to track statistics, make corrections, experiment, do split testing of creatives for the Video network.

Goals in Yandex.Direct

Goals setting, which appeared in Yandex.Direct, was the hot topic of October. If a goal and its value have been specified, the inbuilt algorithm in Yandex.Direct will adjust bids automatically to achieve the highest conversion rate within allocated budget. With this feature, ad campaigns are optimized automatically in such a way as to get the maximum of the most important conversions.

What else new was on Yandex?

• Mobile app ads in Yandex.Direct
• Ads on Yandex home page
• Yandex launches a messenger built into the browser