We continue to study the lessons of the YAN from A to Z course, launched by SEOnews and eLama, an online advertising service.
Today is the seventh lesson. From it you will learn how you can manage your rates, what approaches exist, and how to work with auto strategies to free yourself from routine. Word Nikita Kravchenko, Leading Paid Traffic Specialist, eLama:
Managing rates in YAN
What does the bid in the Yandex Advertising Network affect:
- on the quality of the site;
- on the quality of the audience.
A solvent conversion audience in Yandex is more expensive. This works the same way in other ad systems, such as targeted ads. Therefore, it is recommended to grope the rates for YAN with a test: start with small rates, gradually increasing them, getting to a new audience. This way you will gradually understand:
- what is the optimal rate,
- when it will bring a large amount of traffic, conversions, and these conversions will cost you adequate money.
Algorithm on how to manage rates in YAN
1. Choose a manual strategy with optimization and indicate a key goal.
It s worth starting with a manual bid management strategy. You can set a limit on the rate that you are willing to pay, but Yandex.Direct will still optimize this rate. In fact, you can pay more if Direct predicts a high probability of conversion in a particular auction.
2. Set bids equal to approximately 30% reach or 30% of the cost per click on Search.
If you already have search advertising campaigns, for example, you pay 90 rubles per click, take a rate of 30 rubles for YAN. If on Search you have high bids on the CPC, then in YAN it is unlikely that you will be able to get adequate coverage at low bids.
If you do not yet know what your cost per click on search is, and are just creating a campaign, you can go to the keyword level, see the estimated bids and set a bid for 30% reach.
3. Launch shows in YAN.
4. Monitor site statistics every day.
It is necessary to clean out the sites that eat up the budget and do not lead to conversions. If you see other sites for which there are conversions, you need to allocate the budget to them.
5. Add new negative sites.
We will definitely block impressions in mobile applications if you are not promoting mobile applications. We remove the obvious trash – sites without content, sites for children, if you do not promote children s products or services, sites related to control, abstracts, and so on. Conversions are unlikely to come from such sites, although they may have a lot of traffic, money will be eaten up.
6. Test rate hikes in 15–20% increments for one to two weeks.
Let s say your initial bid was 10 rubles. After two weeks of running an advertising campaign, you can raise the bid to 12-15 rubles and let the campaign run for another one or two weeks. Then you need to see how the statistics will change and further increase the rate to 18–20 rubles.
This way you can gradually increase the rates up to the limit, more than which it is unprofitable for you to pay. This method will allow you to find the optimal bid that will generate traffic and conversions, and the price of these conversions will suit you.
7. Monitor statistics.
Based on the accumulated statistics, you need to optimize your campaign.
8. Testing conversion auto strategies.
Conversion auto strategies can be turned on at the start, but they may not always give a good result. For the auto strategy to work efficiently, the algorithm needs data. An advertiser can start with a conversion auto strategy, but if it doesn t work as expected, the algorithm still has little data.
When to switch to an auto conversion strategy if you don t start it right away
- If during a month every 7 days on a manual strategy you have consistently 10–20 conversions (or better, more), you can enable the conversion auto strategy by goal. Most likely, with this amount of data, Yandex.Direct will give good results.
- The system needs two weeks to train. During this time, nothing must be changed, and advertising campaigns must not be stopped.
When you decide to test a conversion strategy, you need to be sure that you can fully trust the algorithm and not change anything for two weeks, even if the result is not satisfactory.
Two weeks is the minimum that the algorithm needs to learn.
At this time, the cost of conversion, the number of conversions can chaotically jump, coverage and traffic can drop.
If after two weeks the algorithm does not work, you need to change something or switch to a manual strategy.
Conversion Optimization Strategy
This is one of the main strategies as advertisers often have some kind of performance goals. This strategy can be turned on
- limited by weekly budget;
- with a limit on the average cost of conversion (here you need to indicate how much you are willing to pay for achieving one conversion, for example, for sending a completed application form).
You also need to specify:
- the goal for optimization (the goal for which there is enough data);
- select an attribution model (by default, the “Last transition from Yandex.Direct” model is suitable for most projects).
In addition, you can connect pay for conversions:
Yandex.Direct will charge money not for clicks, but only for conversions generated by this particular advertising campaign.
Autostrategy “Click Optimization”
This strategy is suitable for traffic projects (information portals, blogs) or those whose conversion or manual strategies do not work.
Here you can set a restriction on:
- average cost per click;
- on a weekly budget;
- on a batch of clicks (if you need to strictly receive a certain number of clicks in a certain period of time.
Stages of learning auto strategies
If you choose a conversion auto strategy, the training stages will be available to you, that is, after switching on, you can go into the advertising campaign and see what happens to this auto strategy: training is in progress, the strategy has been trained, the strategy is not being trained.
If the strategy is not being trained, it means that Yandex did not achieve 10 conversions in a week, and the conversion price you specified is unattainable for Direct. In this case, you need to think about how to further manage your bids: add another goal for optimization, look at other attribution models, specify a high CPC, or switch to a different auto strategy or manual strategy.
How to help auto-strategy
Despite the fact that auto strategies are a “black box” where Yandex.Direct completely controls everything, the algorithm can be helped to work better.
- Choose a “green” optimization goal that generates at least 10 conversions per week, preferably 50 or 100 conversions per campaign. Sometimes it happens that for a macro goal (for example, sending an application) it is not possible to bring the required number of conversions, but it turns out to be done for a micro goal (for example, clicking on a button).
- Provide an adequate or recommended target CPA. If you indicate that you are ready to pay 100 rubles. per conversion, and an adequate price is 1,000 rubles, Yandex.Direct is unlikely to be able to bring conversions at the price you specified. Yandex will give impressions to those advertisers from which it will earn more.
- Don t limit your weekly budget too much. Ideally, it should be 20 times your target CPC. This is not a hard rule, but just a recommendation, thanks to which the algorithm will have more opportunities for optimization, testing different rates for different audiences.
- Once enabled, do not make any changes to your ad campaigns for at least two weeks. Only then make decisions, draw conclusions about efficiency.
- When the goal or attribution model changes, the algorithm starts learning from scratch. Also, the algorithm starts training completely from scratch if the campaign has been idle for 28 days.
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