Yandex Blog

For over twenty years, we’ve been Russia’s leading digital advertiser, finding new and innovative ways to connect consumers with content. We introduced the first banner ad in Yandex Search in 1997, and four years later, we launched Russia’s first ad placement system with Yandex.Direct. Now Russia’s largest digital advertising platform, Yandex.Direct makes it easy for organizations to place ads within our search results, across the Yandex ecosystem, and on our partner sites in the Yandex Advertising Network (YAN). Our partner sites are central to the success of Yandex.Direct, and today, we’re excited to announce a new collaboration with one of the world’s fastest-growing video content networks, TikTok. Yandex.Direct advertisers will soon be able to place ads in TikTok within the standard YAN auction.

A social network built on curating and sharing 15-second video clips, TikTok’s global user base topped 800 million people in June according to eMarketer.  In the last month in Russia, TikTok was the third most downloaded free app on iOS and Android, according to AppAnnie statistics.  TikTok uses AI algorithms to create personalized feeds for users, ensuring that viewers see relevant content based on how they interact with videos.

As an AI leader ourselves, we use algorithms within Yandex.Direct to ensure we display the most contextually relevant ads to the right audiences.  Through our collaboration with TikTok, our advertising partners will be able to utilize our advanced ad platform to reach an engaged audience.  We will offer video ads within TikTok users’ curated feeds using a format we’ve adapted for the social platform.

After advertisers upload pictures and text, the platform automatically generates video ads with a fitting audio track and other interactive elements such as hearts for likes. The ad is then adapted to a mobile format for the app and shown to relevant TikTok users. Advertisers can target users by search interests, demographic characteristics, geography, and other parameters. 

To learn more about how to get started with digital advertising in Russia through Yandex.Direct, check out the website, where we have information on the platform, advertising tips, and success stories from our advertising partners.

Yandex unveiled a new service for businesses advertising their products on the company’s websites, as well as websites in the Yandex Advertising Network, at its annual e-marketing conference Yac/m. The new service, Yandex.Audience, allows companies use their own customer information to segment audiences for hyper-targeted advertising, as well as target their ads to existing groups of customers to boost upselling campaigns, improve retention, and increase average spend.

After uploading customer information, such as email addresses, telephone numbers or device IDs, to Yandex.Audience, an advertiser receives anonymised IDs identifying their customers among visitors on Yandex’s pages and the YAN websites. These people can now be personally targeted with offers relevant to their previous customer experience – a pair of shoes matching the bag they bought a week ago, or a special loyalty program to recapture lost customers. The same data can be used to identify lookalike audiences – groups of people who exhibit characteristics similar to those of the existing customers and are likely to be interested in the offers that the existing customers were interested in – and target ads to them.

Yandex.Audience is available in English and Russian. To start creating hyper-targeted ad campaigns, an advertiser needs to sign into their account with Yandex’s auction-based service for contextual advertising Yandex.Direct and enter their customer data in the .txt or .csv file. The IDs returned by Yandex.Audience can not identify any individual user, but can be used for delivering personally targeted ads.

Medium- to large-scale businesses such as retailers, banks, car dealers, insurance companies, possessing reasonably large amounts of customer data and striving for customer conversion will appreciate this service most. The amount of data required for hyper-targeted advertising starts at 1,000 records. There is no upper limit for the number of records that can be uploaded to the service, neither is there a limit for the number of types of audiences or hyper-targeted advertising campaigns.

In addition to hyper-targeting opportunities, Yandex.Audience will soon be providing tools for marketing analysis. Yandex's proprietary behaviour analytics technology Crypta, which can identify web users’ interests, age, gender, family status, and even if they have a car or a pet, based on their behaviour online will soon be added to the service. Thanks to this technology, advertisers will be able to use social and demographic statistics of their audiences to plan their marketing strategies.

The global advertising market has been experiencing some serious technology-driven transformation for the past few years. The common trend is the growing popularity of automated web-based services offering media buying and data management capabilities on the demand side and best-value selling opportunities on the supply side. All packed in a convenient, user-friendly interface with comprehensive statistics reporting tools.

Yandex launched its own Real-Time Bidding system for auctioning ad impressions to advertising systems in March 2012. Yandex.Direct and myThings were pioneer participants in the auction, which were later joined by Tinkoff Digital, the developer of Russia’s first RTB platform, and LaModa, one of the most popular fashion e-retailers in Russia.

In line with the current industry trend, companies develop their own Demand-Side Platforms, often powered by the real-time bidding technology, to mediate ad marketing between buyers and sellers, and sharing participants for mutual benefit.

We’re now happy to announce our partnership with Google, which will facilitate global networking and open competition in digital marketing. Through Google’s subsidiary DoubleClick, the company’s advertising clients will now have access to one of Russia’s largest advertising inventories offered by publishers in Yandex’s Advertising Network, while the advertising clients of Yandex will be able to bid for ad displays in the global inventory of DoubleClick AdExchange partners. Both systems are powered by the real-time-bidding technology, which allows advertisers and publishers to maximise their advertising revenues and cut costs through efficient audience targeting and automated, algorithm-based bidding.

The current arrangement between Yandex and Google only relates to display advertising, and does not cover text-based contextual advertising. It also reflects the industry’s movement towards technology-based, in contrast to human mediation-based, trading – a step forward in the evolution of digital advertising. Two of the major players on Russia’s digital market are merging their advertising technologies and feeding grounds to empower both advertisers and publishers. Google and Yandex complement each other in terms of user data, audience-targeting and bid-optimisation, with Yandex’s machine learning technology MatrixNet providing fluidity and precision to behaviour-based targeting, and Google’s cutting-edge ad display optimisation giving all market participants the best value for their money.

Having already signed the bilateral partnership agreement, we're now at the technical stage of implementing this project. First and foremost, this agreement is expected to dramatically increase advertising inventory available to the clients of both companies whose respective advertising pools in the CIS countries don't overlap much. And, of course, pouring a new batch of feed into the fish-tank gives a new kick to competition and boosts the quality of advertising space – the better is the inventory, the more desirable it is for buyers, the higher bids it generates in a real-time bidding auction.

The RTB-based advertising market on the whole benefits from a larger number of bidders and sellers, each with their own targeting goals and display opportunities. The more conditions the system takes into account when matching ads to publishers, the more fine-tuned the ad targeting is and the better optimised the bids are. Accessibility of Yandex’s inventories for Google’s advertising clients, and Google’s inventories for Yandex’s advertisers, supports the idea of and the principle behind real-time bidding – each auction participant has an equal chance to reach their goal.

With a monthly audience of more than 60 million users, Russia is Europe’s largest internet market, having overtaken Germany in 2011. Naturally, this is attracting ever-growing numbers of European, Asian and American companies seeking to tap into Russia with online sales of goods and services, and looking for digital marketing and advertising opportunities. Yandex is now introducing a special training course for these clients, to help them better take advantage of all the opportunities.

Russia is one of just a few countries with local players dominating the domestic internet market. Yandex is one of them: the company boasts 61.5% of all search traffic in Russia as of May 2013. The structure of Russia’s online ad market is also unique, with different platforms at the fore. Last year Yandex overtook Russia’s top TV channel, Pervy Kanal, in daytime audience numbers, and raked in similar ad revenues.

Foreign companies are attracted to Yandex.Direct, the nation’s largest web ad network particularly in such segments as travel (hotel bookings and flights), e-commerce (especially clothing), gaming, and medical services abroad (mainly Israel and Germany).

Outside of Russia and other CIS countries, Yandex’s largest numbers of foreign advertisers are in China, then Germany, the UK and the United States. France, Italy and Spain follow, all at about the same level.

To get closer to its foreign clients, the company last year founded Yandex.Europe AG. It continues to offer all its clients strong support as advertiser numbers grow. Interest from digital marketing agencies is also on the rise, as they look to organise ad campaigns within Yandex services.

Yandex announces the launch of a special programme to train its international advertising clients: both vendors and digital agencies. The training is to take place through the International Marketing School in Barcelona and at some locations in the United States. The course will be delivered to selected Yandex clients and covers the use of the Yandex.Direct contextual advertising service, including creating accounts and campaigns, managing match types and working with retargeting and content networks. The first course starts on June 18, don’t miss the chance to sign up!

The training program is called the “Global PPC Campaign Manager (With Yandex.Expert)” and has been developed by UK-based international search marketing support services group Webcertain working closely in conjunction with the Yandex teams in Moscow and the US.

Two course options are available – an exclusive two-day Yandex version, and a three-day course also covering some other search engines. All participants have the opportunity to attempt the challenging Yandex.Expert online examination as part of the course – the examination was recently translated into English for the benefit of international users of the system.

“Many international advertisers are reaping the benefits of working with Yandex in Russia and other countries, but have fed back a need for greater in-depth knowledge of Yandex systems to maximise their returns,” said Yandex’s US Business Development Director, Preston Carey.

The course will provide participants with a deeper understanding of how to build ad campaigns on Yandex.Direct, the largest automated, auction-based ad-serving system for contextual advertising on the Russian internet with a client base of 315,000 advertisers in 2012.

It will also give insights into other parts of the Yandex Advertising Network – the largest ad network on the Russian internet with a combined audience of almost 57 million – as well as the Yandex.Market online comparison shopping system, which has a monthly audience in Russia of 14.6 million. The service includes more than 50 million price offers placed by more than 12,000 internet stores in 300 categories, from clothing to automobile accessories.

The course is led by Webcertain’s Andy Atkins-Krüger with support from colleagues Justyna Wilner and Immanuel Simonsen. All delegates receive a Workbook guide and full support on taking the Yandex.Expert examination.

Yandex clients who would like the opportunity to participate in the training programme can get more information by e-mail.