How to set up targeting on VKontakte. Targeted advertising "VKontakte": guide, tips, reviews VK targeting

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.

If you want to save time on targeting and quickly recoup your investment in advertising, order advertising from specialists:

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, form the overall budget for the 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:

Send

Our subscribers always get more.

When you have calculated everything, you can go to the VKontakte advertising account and create banners and targeting.

However, you can do it differently. First, go to the advertising account, set up approximate targeting in order to understand what approximate cost you will have for clicks or impressions, and then do all the calculations and start creating banners and fine-tuning targeting.

How to set the cost of advertising?

In fact, all audience settings affect the cost of advertising. Changing at least one leads to a change in the total amount. VKontakte always shows the coverage of the target audience that matches your parameters and the recommended price in the right corner of the advertising account.

Bottom line. At this price, you will be able to reach approximately 70% of the audience.
Upper border. At this price, you will be able to reach more than 90% of the audience.

It is impossible to cover 100% of the entire audience. Not all VKontakte users access the network regularly, which means they will be able to see your ads.

What to choose: pay for clicks or for impressions?

It all depends on the specific advertising campaign: many factors influence the payment method. But if you are just starting to master targeting, I advise you to choose pay per click. This way you will only pay for specific clicks on your ad. If you choose to pay per 1,000 impressions, you run the risk of wasting your budget if your targeting is poor.

Be sure to set limits on all ads. This will insure against unnecessary write-offs and help control the budget.

How to work with the VKontakte advertising account?

Click "Targeted Ads" and select "Create Ads".

Consider three main options for placing ads (VKontakte also offers advertising in the VKontakte Application, but this is a topic for a separate post):

Communities.
Community post.
External site.

1. Community advertising

Click on the “Community” item and in the window that opens, select the group or page that you want to advertise. Click Continue.

There are four ad formats that can be used to promote communities:

Image and text.
Large image.
Community promotion.
special format.

All formats, except for the special one, will be shown to the user on the left - under the control panel. Therefore, this type of advertising, it is also called TGB - a text-graphic block, is available only for the desktop. Ads of these formats have a general auction.

Image and text

Ad Format:

title - up to 33 characters;
description - up to 70 characters;
image — size 145x80 pixels.

This ad format is often used when one picture is not enough, it is necessary to add a description of the advertised object. Here it is recommended to use a call to action not only to inform the user, but also to encourage them to click on the ad to perform the desired action: join the community, buy a product, and so on.

big image

Ad Format:

title - up to 33 characters;
image — size 145x165 pixels.

If you're using this type of ad, it's important to find relevant images because the first thing a person notices is the image. In this format, the image is the basis of the ad. Such banners attract more attention.

Community promotion

Ad Format:

The image is 145×145 pixels in size.
The title is unchanged. The name of your community is automatically pulled here. But if the title is longer than 33 characters, the text is truncated. Sometimes for community ads in this format, it is recommended to temporarily change the name to a shorter one so that the ad looks good.
The number of subscribers.
Subscribe button.

The banner also indicates how many subscribers are in your community, but the data is rounded. Additionally, there is a "Subscribe" button so that the user can become a member of the community in one click, excluding an extra step - going to the community. But if you're just starting to grow your community and don't have many members, this listing of subscribers can turn users off.

special format

A special ad format for communities is separated into a separate auction. Such ads compete for display only with ads from other communities of the same format. Ads of a special format are shown in the user's VKontakte news feed.

In the case of using a special community advertising format, the image must have a contrasting background, that is, the use of light shades of the background and white color is unacceptable.

Ad Format:

image — size 256×256 pixels;
title - unchanged, the name of your community is automatically pulled up; by default, the title can only fit 33 characters, but in fact the title is truncated to 15 characters;
indication of the number of subscribers.

2. Advertise the post in the community

Most recently, VKontakte added a new toolkit - now you can advertise not only specific posts from your community, but also make hidden posts. The latter will be advertised in the user's news feed, but will not be published in the community.

Which one to choose depends on your goals. For example, if you have only one post in the near future with important information, you can post it in the community, and then launch an advertising campaign.

If you need to advertise on a lot of products, but you don’t want to clog the community feed, then use hidden posts. In addition, you can create not one, but several banners for one target audience in order to test. In this case, hidden posts are also suitable.

If you are creating an ad for an existing post in the community, simply copy and paste the link to that post into a blank box and click Continue. All targeting settings for the ad will open.

If you need a hidden post, click "Create Post", select the community for which you will create an ad, and start posting.

To create such ads, you need to specify a link to the page of the site where you want to bring users. The domain will be pulled up automatically. Click "Continue" and proceed to create an ad.

large image;
image and text.

When you have decided on the creative and made a great ad, you can start setting up targeting.

Setting targeting options

First of all, choose the topic of the ad and the subsection to which your ad belongs. There may be several subsections. These parameters are filled for moderators. What you choose here does not affect audience settings. For some types of advertising, age restrictions must also be indicated.

All further settings already apply to the audience that you select to display ads.

1. Geography of users

The column "Except" is needed to remove some settlements from advertising. For example, you select broad targeting for all of Russia, but exclude Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In the columns "Regions", "Metro stations", "Streets" you can specify certain locations where users will see the ad. For example, you advertise a store located in the Akademichesky district of Moscow. You can consider residents of the area as potential buyers.

2. Audience demographics

Select the gender and age of the target audience. Relevant data is taken from user pages. But not everyone fills in full information about themselves, so when choosing, for example, targeting women aged 25-35, you do not take into account women who did not indicate their gender or age. For more precise adjustment to the target audience, it is recommended to use other parameters.

The Birthday option can be useful for some products and services. So, you can offer people who have a birthday coming up to buy gifts with a special discount. There are cases where this setting really worked.

The Nescafe campaign, targeting female usernames and cities, received over 1 million views in a month.

The marital status is chosen by the user. This option can also be successfully used. For example, if a girl is proposed, she changes her marital status to "Engaged" and immediately starts seeing advertisements for wedding dresses, stylists, and photographers.

3. Interests of users

In this block, various interests are configured. You can choose one of the interests for each ad and track the reaction, or combine parameters to narrow down the target audience. But don't limit your audience too much! If you select from two or more parameters, then only those users who match all the selected parameters at once, and not one of them, will fall into your targeting.

The "Interests" parameter is the hobbies specified by the user on their page. There are many interests, start typing the one you need in the field and it will automatically pull up if it is on the list.

Advice. Remember that users do not always fill in their interests. And if they fill in, then in the future they either do not change them, or they do it very rarely. Therefore, interest targeting may not always produce the expected results.

It is better to use "Categories of interests". They are calculated based on user interaction with VKontakte communities and external sites on various topics. Now there are not so many categories of interests, and they are quite general. Soon the VKontakte team promises to expand this list by adding narrower categories.

4. User communities

Another interesting option for setting up ads is "communities". Here you can select any communities that you think potential clients might be in. For example, if your audience is accountants, they are most likely subscribed to accounting publics, as it is important for them to keep abreast of news about changes in legislation.

Pay attention to the number of subscribers, their activity within the public, the frequency of publishing material. If the last post in the community was six months ago, it is unlikely to be interesting.

Advice. Use parsing services - there are paid and free ones that will help you more accurately segment your audience. Among other things, parsing services allow you to collect subscribers of communities of the desired topic, to identify among them active ones who are members of several communities.

The "Exclude" option allows you to remove from targeting those communities that you do not want to advertise. Often they indicate their community here, whose subscribers are already up to date with news and promotions.

5. Applications and websites

Here you can specify the sites on which the user logs in through his VKontakte account, or using various applications that the visitor uses. They can be excluded from targeting.

VKontakte also allows you to select the user's religious affiliation.

If you tag travelers, the service will collect all users who visited the VKontakte website from at least two different countries over the past year.

6. Education and work

When choosing a secondary or higher education, the service allows you to select certain educational institutions and the time of study.

You can also select user positions. The data for this parameter is collected from users' personal pages.

7. Additional options

Devices, operating systems, and browsers used by users can be selected from the proposed list. It is enough to start entering the required parameter.

But let's take a closer look at audiences for retargeting.

This is a very important parameter that you should definitely use if you have your own website.

How does retargeting work?

Retargeting- a tool that allows you to show advertising materials to users who are already familiar with a product or service or have visited the site before.

Retargeting allows you not to miss "warm leads". So, if a person came to the site from contextual advertising, looked at the product or even put it in the cart, but didn’t buy it in the end, VKontakte retargeting will help to “catch up” with the user on the social network. This way you increase conversions on the site.

For VKontakte, it is better to collect an audience of at least 1000 people, but it is better to start with 3000 or more users.

To set up retargeting, you need to generate a retargeting code (or pixel) and paste it on your website. Then VKontakte will be able to collect site visitors so that in the future you can catch up with them with advertising.

To create a pixel, you need to follow three simple steps:

Specify the name of the pixel.
Specify the domain of the site where you want to paste the code.
Select a theme for the site.

Now you need to copy the resulting code and paste it on the site between the tags And. If you don't have access to the site code, just contact your system administrators (or developers).

Until you install a pixel, it will have a "not working" status. After installation, the status will change to "working". From now on, you can start creating and configuring retargeting audiences.

Retargeting Audiences

Audience - a customizable VKontakte user base that you can target your advertisements to. The audience can be filled in two ways:

load from file;
get from the site using the VKontakte pixel.

To create a retargeting audience, you need to go to the "Audiences" tab and select "Create Audience".

In the window that opens, the service offers two options for collecting an audience: using a pixel, or by uploading a file.

How to create audiences with a retargeting pixel?

With a pixel, you can create two types of audiences:

all site visitors;
users who visited individual pages.

To create an audience of all site visitors, you must:

Enter the name of the audience.
Select the previously created pixel from the drop-down list.
Specify the rule "All site visitors".
Select the time period for which you need data: for all time, for a month or a day. The time period can be changed later at any time.
Save the audience.

To create an audience of users who visited individual pages, you need to:

Specify the name of the audience.
Select a pixel.
Select the "Users who visited specific pages" rule.
Specify a time interval.
Then you can select the required options. Here you can specify users who visited a specific page of the site, for example, a product card. To do this, you need to insert a link to a specific page into an empty box and select the appropriate rule from the drop-down list - it depends on the link whether it will change or not.
Save the audience.

How to create an audience using a list?

It is enough to select the source "Load from file" in the window that opens. Next, you need to select a file on your computer and upload it to the advertising account. VKontakte will automatically find users for you based on the data provided.

What data does the system “recognize”?

email addresses;
telephones;
User IDs.

Please note that uploaded lists must match

21.03.2017 | 12:15

Greetings, dear friends! I think none of you will argue with the fact that the promotion of any projects on the Internet will be ineffective without quality advertising. I will not tell you about all the existing ways of promotion, but will focus on social networks. If you remember, earlier I already wrote reviews on how it works, where to start promoting a project on a social network in order to attract customers, and much more. All this knowledge will be useful to us today, because on their basis the main rule of promotion in social networks has already been formed - advertising should always cover the audience of users who interested in your offer. In today's article, I want to move away from the already beaten path - the creation of and, and consider a much faster method in terms of return on investment. So, on the agenda is VKontakte targeting, its capabilities, rules of use and the principle of setting.

Basic terms and definitions

Before mastering the functionality of targeting advertising, I suggest first finding out what kind of fruit it is and what it is eaten with. So, remember what VK advertisements pop up on the left side of your news feed? Remembered? If yes, then you are already familiar with targeted advertising. As a rule, such ads consist of a title and an image. Sometimes the basic composition can be diluted with a small text description.

If we compare targeted advertising on VKontakte with classic contextual advertising, then we immediately want to note their main difference - ultra-precise targeting ads not on page content, but for a specific group of users. In other words, targeted ads are aimed at a specific target audience, at users interested in a product or service.

With the help of the simplest toolkit offered by the contact, you can easily perform advertising setting. Among the options available to you, there will be both ordinary ones - geotargeting and demotargeting, and narrower ones. The latter include education, position, interests. VK targeting will allow you to show your ads exclusively to people who listen to the songs of a particular musical group or live near a particular bus stop.

Basic Targeted Advertising Terminology

That our course of study be complete, I just have to create a glossary of terms for you that will allow you to switch to "you" with targeting. When setting up an advertising campaign, you will definitely come across such terms as:

On this theoretical training in the basics can be considered complete, I propose to move on to more pressing issues.

Who is targeted advertising for?

Daily traffic is about 80 million people. Just think how huge this number is! Unfortunately, despite the richness of the audience, many businessmen may not even know what targeting is, since this type of promotion simply does not suit them.

I suggest you understand for sure whether you should go through further training and move on to the practical part of the article or finish your acquaintance with targeted advertising right now. So, it makes sense to study targeting for those who:

sells clothes, shoes, accessories
sells electronics- smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.
busy in the field restaurant business– attracts visitors to fast food outlets, cafes, bars, restaurants, nightclubs, raves
is engaged promotion of information products– trainings, seminars, master classes and so on
employed in certain areas B2B-business
promotes schools of dance, drawing and the like
advertises quests, entertainment programs, game rooms And so on

Who can't use?

industry
construction and repair
most large and long-term B2B segments
sale of tobacco products and alcohol
sex shops
HYIPs and financial pyramids

Agree that selling specialized industrial equipment on VKontakte is not an easy task. Although, if you try hard and know how to set up ads, it is possible that this is also possible.

As for tobacco products, alcohol, all kinds of pyramid schemes and sex industry products, they would, of course, go to the social network simply with “Hurrah!”. But, unfortunately, such products do not pass site moderation so look for other ways to promote them.

How to find your target audience?

For your ad to be effective and get the most out of it, it’s not enough just to know what your target audience looks like, you also need to be able to find her. This list will help you basic criteria, which you can focus on when drawing up a portrait of your consumer. The list of main parameters includes:

In total, VKontakte will offer you about 20 selection parameters. You have the right to set up targeting in the way that seems right to you. You'll even have the ability to sort users by very specific criteria. For example, your ad will be shown only to people who are going to celebrate a birthday in the near future. In the future you will be able to analytics and calculate which of the settings produced the best result for your ad.

In general, I can tell you with firm confidence that with the help of targeting, you are guaranteed to achieve simply fantastic results- but only if you clearly understand what and to whom you offer.

Irreplaceable assistants in finding the target audience

Since you already have an idea of how targeted advertising works, you know, and even managed to get acquainted with the filters for selecting the target audience, I think it would not be superfluous to tell you about services for selection of this audience by user id. Here are a few sites that know almost everything about how to properly set up targeted VK advertising:

Pepper.ninja - a tool for improving the accuracy of targeting, which collects the target audience both on the open spaces of Vkontakte and Facebook. The principle of its operation is based on obtaining data on the most active users of publics and groups. All service work is done in the cloud.. An undoubted advantage can be considered simplicity of the interface which is understandable to users on an intuitive level
VKParser - a professional tool for smm-makers, which is effectively used to promote all kinds of goods and services on a social network. Parser accurately determines the target audience by analyzing user profiles and communities. The service can search for popular posts, evaluate VKontakte messages on external sites.

Gather the target audience for business with Pepper.ninja

By and large, those who clearly understand who their product or service is aimed at, who knows how to set up VKontakte targeting, may not use auxiliary services at all. The functionality of VK will be quite enough for you to independently determine the target audience, if you have a specific idea about it. But these services save time very well.

Types of targeting

Targeted advertising is something between contextual advertising and teaser. Unfortunately, it cannot be shown to those who are engaged in the internal search of VKontakte, as is the case with the context. However, the correct setting allows you to find the target audience for product PR and get rid of the senseless traffic drain, as is the case with the teaser network. To date, you and I have access to whole 5 formats of targeted advertising VK.

Image and text

This option is great if you can’t put all the necessary information in the title of the ad or want to briefly describe the promoted product.

The maximum possible ad title length is 25 characters
The maximum allowed description length is 60 characters
The minimum banner resolution is 90*60 pixels.

Large Image with Title

This format is the most popular and is considered the most universal. It is most often used in cases where it immediately becomes clear from the title what the ad is about.

The maximum title size is 25 characters
The minimum banner resolution is 90*120 pixels

Exclusive

The advantage of this format is that the ad will be the only one on the page and will have a larger banner. This option is much more expensive than the others, and it can rarely be called effective.

The maximum title length remains the same - 25 characters
The minimum size is 90*160px

Promoting a group or community

It is actively used to promote brands, publics, groups that are dedicated to certain places or specific individuals.

The title will duplicate the name of your group. You can shorten or leave it as you wish. As for increasing it, it's impossible.
The minimum banner resolution is 90*90 pixels

special format

Perfect option for the promotion of thematic groups.

The title duplicates the name of your public or community
The minimum banner scale is 128*128 pixels
The banner must be contrasting and different from the main background of VKontakte

Basic Rules

Before you advertise on VK, you will need to check the ad. This is necessary for the VKontakte administration to successfully moderate it and publish it. I can tell you right away that if you make a mistake or a typo in the text, use a low-quality, frightening or simply frank banner, your ad will be rejected.

List

Before submitting an ad, I suggest that you study the basic rules. So, VKontakte categorically prohibits the creation of advertising campaigns:

Subtleties and features

Please note that:

the image you use in your ad must be high quality
in the case of applying text to the image, the symbols occupy no more than 50% of the total area of the banner
the subject of the ad should repeat the subject of the site to which it takes the user
if you are posting an ad promoting medical services, you will need to provide the social network with relevant documentation
your ad does not violate the privacy policy

Well, in general, those who are engaged in honest business, do not suffer from problems with the Russian language, do not need to worry about anything. With a probability of 99.9%, your ads will successfully pass site moderation. In extreme cases, VKontakte will notify you of the reason for the rejection of your request.

Targeting step by step guide

Well, now let's get down to the most interesting part - advertising placement and its settings. For this you need:

Follow the link and create your personal account
On the left side of the window, click on the button Targeted Ads»
In the window that opens, click on the " Create ad»

Creating an ad

To make it very clear to you how to place an ad in a contact, I suggest going all the way to creating a targeted ad using my example:

We choose what we need project format which we are going to advertise. In my case it is " External site" website.
If one of you is interested in and is going to advertise your own community, the principle of action in this case will be similar, but you will not need to use UTM tags
Enter the address of our site in the top field, the domain will be pulled up automatically. Now click on the button " Continue»
In the window that opens, fill out the standard form.
In the category " Decor» I choose the format for my ad « big image”, and then I write in the title bar the text that I want to see on the banner
Since my site is all about investments, in the ad subject category, I choose " Financial services»

Setting the target audience

Since the readers of my site are not limited to only one country, in the settings in the paragraph " A country" I choose " Any". You will choose the option that you need. Here you can also specify the city, metro station and even the street
Let's move on to filtering by gender. My target audience are men, and therefore I choose them. You form this category according to your needs.
Decide who will be interested in your product, how old are your potential customers, and then sort the list. In my case, the basis is 25-55 years
If the product you are advertising will be of interest to future birthdays, check the appropriate box in the line " Birthday»
After all the data is entered, on the right side of the screen you will see how much one of your ads costs and what audience it can cover
We go down even lower and fill in the categories " Interests», « Education and work". Since my site is designed for people involved in investment activities, trading in the foreign exchange and stock markets, I sort the target audience by choosing those users who have higher education and are interested in business, investments, passive income, money, Internet earnings and the like.
In the future, you can change and play with interests, for example, remove higher education, since very often people without it have much more zeal for knowledge and learning new things
I advise you to analyze 10-20 representatives of your target audience in order to find groups in which the maximum number of potential consumers of your product is concentrated. This information will be useful to you when filling out the category " Communities»
According to the criterion outlook» It will be possible to filter the target audience by religion. In my case, this item is of no use, so I skip it.
As for the line " Travelers”, then by checking this box, you will limit your target audience to people who travel abroad at least once every six months. This function was not useful to me, but it will be useful for those who advertise tours or expensive goods.
In the category " Education» you will see the position « Job title". Here I am interested in people who hold such positions as an economist, director, manager, and so on. You choose those specialists who are the target audience of your project
Let's go to " Additional Options". Here we can fill in retargeting groups, specify the devices from which users of our VKontakte target audience should enter. Personally, it doesn’t matter to me whether the user will scroll through the news feed while sitting at a computer or using a mobile phone. However, if you, for example, sell cases for smartphones, it would be logical to limit the target audience by indicating in this category " All mobile phones»
Operating systems and browsers are configured in the same way.
Finally, let's move on to financial matters. In the category " Setting price and location» We choose the PR option that suits our wallet best. Since I am confident in the given target audience, I activate " Pay for impressions»
The recommended social network price for 1000 impressions was 6.33 rubles for my ad.
However, I lower it to 1.1 rubles. I advise you to start with the minimum prices, which will be an order of magnitude lower than the recommended ones. If, after passing the moderation, your ad does not begin to be published, feel free to increase the price by 50 kopecks until the ad appears on the network.
Now that everything is ready, give your ad campaign a name and click on " Create ad»
Set limits and run ad

And finally, a few more useful tips that will help you when creating an advertising campaign:

Encourage your target audience to click through your ad by offering some bonus. By the way, information about promotions or discounts, written in the title of the ad or in its description, gives an excellent return.

conclusions

Well, it's time for me to end here. The information provided here is more than enough to get you started with targeted advertising. Don't forget to share your experience of promoting projects on social networks using targeting in the comments below this post. Tell us what you advertised, how you set up your ads, who your target audience was, and what result you got in the end. Well, on this I say goodbye to you. See you soon, friends!

If you find a mistake in the text, please highlight a piece of text and click Ctrl+Enter. Thanks for helping my blog get better!

From the author: Greetings. Today I will tell you about how to set up a VK target or targeted Vkontakte advertising. I must say right away that the article will not give any specific cases, we will simply consider this traffic source as a whole, and I will also give some general recommendations for working with it.

Target VK - what is it?

Target in translation from English means goal. That is, targeted advertising can be called one that hits the target. Naturally, only if it is configured correctly. I will not configure it for you, but I will help you at least understand the basic settings in this article.

Target VK: setting, going through the possibilities of advertising

I must say right away that the developers of Vkontakte gave advertisers quite ample opportunities in terms of customization. There are not as many of them as, for example, in MyTarget, but much more than in most other systems.

Well, from words to deeds, let's move on to creating a new ad. Immediately, the site will immediately ask you what exactly you are going to advertise, further actions depend on it. Let's say I choose an External site to advertise some affiliate program.

So, after entering the address, the creation of the ad itself becomes available to us, as well as the targeting itself, that is, the choice to whom this ad should be shown. Let's go through all the points specifically.

Ad format. There are 2 options, you can choose a small image (width greater than height), title and description. If you think that one title will be enough (which is limited to 25 characters), and instead of a description you would rather insert a large picture, choose a format with a large image. This format is suitable for advertising various online games and, in general, everything that is in high demand and does not require a special description.

The description format allows you to describe the essence of your offer in 60 characters in more detail. Advice. Immediately adjust the pictures that you plan to insert to the proportions recommended by the service.

Subject of the announcement. Choose the one that comes closest to the essence of your ad. If you find it difficult to do this, choose the topic “Other”. I choose it quite often, the moderators have no complaints.

Age marking. I never specified it, but if you think it is relevant for your ad, you can specify it.

The most interesting thing is setting the target audience

Here, first you are waiting for the GEO settings. In most cases, they are very important, since you can advertise a product or service that is relevant for only one country, region or city. For example, you are advertising some event that will take place in a major city. Then you need people from this particular city, let it be Kyiv.

Accordingly, I choose the country Ukraine and the city of Kyiv. Immediately to the right, the target audience and the recommended cost per click change. Vkontakte shows me that the target audience is almost 5 million people, although in fact I watched the population of Kyiv the other day - only 3 million.

I can roughly explain why the VK target has such large numbers:

Many people register several accounts on a social network, so there are several accounts per person

Many of those who live near Kyiv indicate this city in their profile, although they are not its direct inhabitants

It's just that a lot of people put this city, although in fact they don't live in it and maybe they have never even been.

Suppose you invite people to some IT event. In this case, the vast majority of your target audience is men. I will also set the age from 16 to 50.

But this is not yet the target audience. Firstly, while our audience is too large (more than a million). Secondly, it is not targeted, since men from 16 to 50 years old can do anything: collecting coins, cycling, gambling. And we need only those who are interested in IT.

Ways to highlight the target audience

The first way is by profession. You just have to find out the list of all the main professions and enter them. See Education and work - Positions. For example, I introduced 2 professions related to IT.

The target audience immediately decreased and now it is 1800 people.

Perhaps you need more, so you can find and add more professions related to IT. Okay, this is the first way. The second way is by category of interests. Very simply, we look at the Interests item and select IT in it.

We found 105 thousand men from Kyiv aged 16 to 50 who are interested in IT in one way or another.

The downside of this method is only that the interest of many can be very weak and it is not really known how much a person is really interested in this area.

The third way is by communities. It is also a good enough option, because if a person is in the IT community, then this topic is at least minimally interesting to him. So you can select several IT communities and get a good number of potential customers.

The fourth way is by application. You can show ads only to those people who have this or that application added (from those that have Vkontakte). Perhaps, for my fictional example, this method is not suitable, but for many other cases it is quite.

Extra options

Devices. If it is critical for you that ads are shown only to people visiting the site from certain devices, choose from the list.

OS. Again, if it matters to you, choose the correct OC. Let's say you advertise a Windows 7 cleaner. Then you need to show ads only to those who have this OC.

Price setting

You can choose to pay for specific clicks or for 1000 impressions. The recommended price mainly depends on the target and especially on the GEO. For example, buying traffic from Moscow is more expensive than from a smaller city.

If you choose payment for clicks, then here you can choose where exactly the ad will be shown - only on Vkontakte or also on partner sites. For beginners, I recommend limiting yourself to the social network itself.

How to set the cost of the transition itself? The most commonplace advice is to set the average recommended price. That is, if the recommended price range is 8-12 clicks, we set 10.

But in most cases, you can bet less. For example, 20-50% of the recommended price: 4-5 rubles. In this case, Vkontakte may underestimate the speed of the ad and reduce coverage.

If you decide to pay for 1000 impressions, the cost is much less. For example, if for 1 click my recommended price was 8-12 rubles, then for 1000 impressions 2.5-3.5 rubles. Significantly less!

At the same time, you can put even less, but when paying for impressions, you should remember that the lower your price, the more Vkontakte will show your ads to the same people. If you raise the price, it starts to show to a more unique audience. Therefore, it is not always worth saving and setting a very small price.

Also, when paying for impressions, always check the “Limit to 100 impressions per person” box. If a person has been shown an ad 100 times and he has not clicked on it, then he is unlikely to click on it even from the 1000th impression. Usually, if I'm interested in an ad, I click on it right away. That is why I recommend that you check this box.

This is about the very possibilities of targeted advertising on Vkontakte, but besides this, I can also give you a couple of useful tips on how to make your advertising more effective.

The bottom line is that you can upload a list of identifiers (or email addresses) of Vkontakte users to the system and advertising will be shown only to them. You can create such lists with the help of parsers like TargetHunter.

Outcome

So we sorted out the VK target setting. In fact, this is a fairly simple source of traffic, simpler than contextual advertising or MyTarget. But not the easiest either. You can get the hang of it fairly quickly.

Who knows, perhaps it is with the help of targeted advertising on Vkontakte that you can earn your first money on affiliate programs. Today I told you about the main settings and features, and also shared my checklist on how to improve the effectiveness of your targeted advertising on Vkontakte. Good luck!

How to set up targeting on Vkontakte? Sooner or later, people who run their business on Vkontakte are faced with this issue. In the article, you will learn how to properly set up targeted advertising on Vkontakte in 2020 and, most importantly, you will receive detailed step-by-step instructions.

Save this article for yourself. You can return to it the moment you're ready to set up your ad campaign!

The content of the article:

Where to start, you ask?

Decide on the target audience

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.

How to calculate the budget of an advertising company?

To calculate, you need to know the formulas and indicators that are used in targeted advertising:

1. - 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 - conversion rate.

Two formulas can be used to calculate the budget, depending on what type of payment you will be using:

1. 1. Budget = Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM) / 1000 x Impressions.
  2. Budget = cost per click (CPC) x number of clicks.

You can also use these formulas for calculations:

1. 1. Impressions = Clicks / CTR.
  2. CTR = clicks / impressions.
  3. Clicks = Impressions x CTR.
  4. Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) = budget / number of impressions x 1000.
  5. Cost per click (CPC) = budget / number of clicks.
  6. CR (conversion rate) = number of conversions / number of clicks.

Consider an example:

CR (conversion rate) = 7% .

It was committed 500 clicks.

500 clicks x 7% = 35 conversions (leads).

Average check of the company- 3,500 rubles.

Marketing costs- 30%, which means that you can spend no more than 1,050 rubles (3,500 rubles x 30%) on attracting one client.

The total budget of the Republic of Kazakhstan (for 35 leads): 35 clicks x 1050 rubles = 36,750 rubles.

Cost per click (CPC): 36,750 rubles / 500 clicks = 73.5 rubles.

CTR= 0.9% (you can set a different CTR based on your experience with advertising campaigns).

500 clicks / 0.9% = 55 556 impressions.

Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM): 36,750 rubles / 55,556 impressions x 1000 = 661 rubles.

When you have calculated everything, you can go to the VKontakte advertising account and create banners and targeting.

How to set the cost of advertising Vkontakte?

Bottom line. At this price, you will be able to reach approximately 70% of the audience.
Upper border. At this price, you will be able to reach more than 90% of the audience.

It is impossible to cover 100% of the entire audience. Not all VKontakte users access the network regularly, which means they will be able to see your ads.

Remember: VKontakte inflates the price for advertising ads, so I advise you to start with a lower rate - from 30%. At least as a test of settings. There is an auction of the first price in the social network - exactly the amount that you set as a bid is written off.

What to choose: pay for clicks or for impressions?

Be sure to set limits on all ads. This will insure against unnecessary write-offs and help control the budget.

How to work with the VKontakte advertising account?

Carousel. Here you can pack from 3 to 10 product cards, a link and a phone number by which you can place an order. The carousel is displayed in the user's news feed.
Recording with a button. More versatile than the carousel, but the target action that the client must complete is only one. The options are sign up, buy, join and so on. It will also appear in the news feed.
Universal text-graphic block. Shown in the sidebar of the VKontakte menu. You can sew up a link or a phone number.
Collection of applications. Designed to obtain contact information of users. The place of display is the news feed.
Advertising in stories. A fresh promotional post format designed for placement in user stories. Hangs, like regular stories, 24 hours.
Site advertising. An external link is inserted into this block to navigate to an external resource. Designed to increase site traffic from social networks.

Setting targeting options

All further settings already apply to the audience that you select to display ads.

1. Geography of users

The column "Except" is needed to remove some settlements from advertising. For example, you select broad targeting for all of Russia, but exclude Moscow and St. Petersburg.

2. Audience demographics

3. Interests of users

4. User communities

Another interesting option for customizing ads is "communities". Here you can select any communities that you think potential clients might be in. For example, if your audience is accountants, they are most likely subscribed to accounting publics, as it is important for them to keep abreast of news about changes in legislation.

Advice. Use parsing services - there are paid and free ones that will help you segment your audience more accurately. Among other things, parsing services allow you to collect subscribers of communities of the desired topic, to identify among them active ones who are members of several communities.

5. Applications and websites

Here you can specify the sites on which the user logs in through his VKontakte account, or using various applications that the visitor uses. They can be excluded from targeting.

VKontakte also allows you to select the user's religious affiliation.

If you tag travelers, the service will collect all users who visited the VKontakte website from at least two different countries over the past year.

6. Education and work

When choosing a secondary or higher education, the service allows you to select certain educational institutions and the time of study.

You can also select user positions. The data for this parameter is collected from users' personal pages.

7. Additional options

Devices, operating systems, and browsers used by users can be selected from the proposed list. It is enough to start entering the required parameter.

But let's take a closer look at audiences for retargeting.

This is a very important parameter that you should definitely use if you have your own website.

How does retargeting work?

Retargeting- a tool that allows you to show promotional materials to users who are already familiar with a product or service or have visited the site before.

For VKontakte, it is better to collect an audience of at least 1000 people, but it is better to start with 3000 or more users.

To get started, go to the left menu in the section "Retargeting" .

To create a pixel, you need to follow three simple steps:

Specify the name of the pixel.
Specify the domain of the site where you want to paste the code.
Select a theme for the site.

Now you need to copy the resulting code and paste it on the site between the tags And. If you don't have access to the site code, just contact your system administrators (or developers).

Until you install a pixel, it will have a "not working" status. After installation, the status will change to "working". From now on, you can start creating and configuring retargeting audiences.

Retargeting Audiences

Audience - a customizable VKontakte user base to which you can target your advertisements. The audience can be filled in two ways:

load from file;
get from the site using the VKontakte pixel.

To create a retargeting audience, you need to go to the "Audiences" tab and select "Create Audience".

In the window that opens, the service offers two options for collecting an audience: using a pixel, or by uploading a file.

How to create audiences with a retargeting pixel?

With a pixel, you can create two types of audiences:

all site visitors;
users who visited individual pages.

To create an audience of all site visitors, you must:

Enter the name of the audience.
Select the previously created pixel from the drop-down list.
Specify the rule "All site visitors".
Select the time period for which you need data: for all time, for a month or a day. The time period can be changed later at any time.
Save the audience.

To create an audience of users who visited individual pages, you need to:

Specify the name of the audience.
Select a pixel.
Select the "Users who visited specific pages" rule.
Specify the time interval. Next, you can select the necessary parameters. Here you can specify users who visited a specific page of the site, for example, a product card. To do this, insert a link to a specific page into an empty box and select the appropriate rule from the drop-down list - it depends on the link whether it will change or not.
Save the audience.

How to create an audience using a list?

What data does the system “recognize”?

email addresses;
telephones;
User IDs.

Please note that uploaded lists must match

Below you will learn everything about how to properly set up targeted advertising in VK. The algorithm will be considered in full - we will begin to analyze the target audience and finish with the launch of an advertising campaign.

Target audience analysis

The main task is to find out to whom to offer the product according to the main parameters:

age
gender;
income
social status, etc.

You can also use the character method.

You need to answer yourself and a number of questions that will help to draw up a portrait of the target audience. Let's get started:

When can a client use your services?

If there is no understanding of where to aim, then with the help of this question you can find your target audience. Let's take sports supplements as an example. When are they bought? Could advise a nutritionist or trainer. Others saw promotions in sports stores. Still others go on a diet, but at the same time they want to sometimes allow themselves low-calorie sweets. The more options, the better.

What hobbies of the client will help him become interested in the service?

Find overlapping interests - gyms, swimming pools, jobs that require you to be in shape. So you will understand where your target audience is. It is recommended to use parsers. For example, Cerebro Target and Target Hunter are suitable.

What product do your customers need?

Thanks to this question, you will be able to find your competitors.

What else is the client interested in?

If a person has previously been looking for home exercise equipment, clothes for training, then he will most likely take a sports drink.

What should a person have to become your client.

If we talk about the above example, then a person should have a positive attitude towards sports nutrition.

What problem can your product solve?

For example:

Adjust your diet.
Lose weight.
Make healthy sleep.

Does your client look up to someone?

In this case, it can be famous people from fitness.

Transfer the answers to your questions for clarity in MindMap. Example:

Test the resulting segments without fail. Find out if all customers like your product. Will every person who runs in the morning eat low-calorie food. Most likely no.

You can also order SMM settings from a specialist and not delve into all these tricks.

Parsing the target audience

Now we need to do audience parsing. Cerebro Target is the most popular service for working with VKontakte advertising. He can:

highlight active users;
search for similar audiences;
look for people who interacted with certain posts;
find thematic communities, etc.

You can also use Target Hunter. Both services are functionally similar.

You don't need all the people, you just need a certain audience. You can narrow it down by:

geography;
social features;
interests;
work and education;
various additional options.

VKontakte targeting can analyze user profiles and show where these people are most often.

Setting up targeted advertising on Vkontakte

Click on this button:

Decide what you will promote: public posts, some website, application or public. Choose the right ad format:

Make an announcement:

Set up the target audience according to certain parameters:

Specify the payment methods and the price you will pay for the transitions:

The cost is based on:

target settings;
the number of ads that target the right users;
ad price.

When paying for impressions, the auction principle will work: the more money, the more people will notice the ad. You pay for each individual ad impression.

Next, you need to name the company and click on the “Create ad” button.

Replenish the budget - for 1 ad at least 10 rubles.

Wait for the ad to be moderated.

It is forbidden to advertise tobacco, alcohol and drugs, politics, gambling, etc. look help VKontakte to learn more about the rules.

When moderation passes, the impressions will start automatically. You can see the statistics:

If the ad is rejected, they will definitely indicate what is recommended to be corrected:

If necessary, you can change:

the cost of 1000 impressions / transitions;
decor;
settings.

Choose a format

Advertising carousel

Then select the public from which you are creating the entry:

You need to write the text without links and create up to 10 cards. In each it is allowed to add:

title up to 25 characters;
illustration;
link to go;
price;
button.

Using this format, you can promote products from online stores or a line of a particular brand.

Universal notation

You need to select the community in the same way, and then add text and content:

In this format they are moving forward:

advertising posts;
posts on the wall of the public.

Recording with a button

Similarly, select a community and write no more than 220 characters of text:

In the snippet, you can upload an illustration and make a different title. There are also several options for the button:

to another site
to the community;
to the application;
phone number dialing.

Button+Video

Instead of an illustration in this format, you can add a video:

It helps:

view browsing statistics;
set up different targeting;
adjust to a certain internet speed.

Promotional post with an active link to the portal

Now with its help you can attract target audience to the site:

Advertising on the portal pages

Each object has its own format:

“Text and image” includes a title, object type, picture and text with a description:

In the “Big Image” everything is the same, except for the description:

In “Community Promotion” there is a name of the public, the number of participants or friends, a logo and several possible buttons:

“Square Images” contains a name, number of friends or members, a logo and two button options:

This format has a square cover in certain sizes, a title, a game rating, and a genre.

Which format is suitable for a start-up or small business

Specialists in traffic and setting up targeted advertising on VKontakte - recommends looking at the budget and the number of the segment.

Suppose you have many different target audiences, but the budget is 5000 rubles. Then you should start with teasers. You can create multiple variations of ads.

After that, the campaign can be scaled up - launch promo posts for certain effective segments. The sample should be increased to at least 50,000.

Launching a test campaign in VK

SMM specialists advise testing all audiences at the same time if the budget allows. 100 rubles - the minimum amount for each ad. Moreover:

once every 60 minutes you need to adjust the rate;
Disable ads with CTRs below 0.7 when they hit 1,000 impressions.
further conclusions can be drawn upon reaching the bar of 5,000 impressions.

Before disabling ads, look at Yandex.Metrica. Sometimes it happens that low-converting ads suddenly start selling.

We create creatives for advertising on Vkontakte

The first situation - you are selling products that are understandable to the client. He can choose from several brands. To increase clickability

you need to focus on the price if the product costs less than others:

if the product is expensive, then show the main advantages;
for consumer goods, use the words “Do you want?” or “Finished?”:

If these methods do not work, then there are two more effective options.

association method

Suitable if the product is sold in a complex niche, it has a narrow audience and a special theme. An example is the CrossFit blog.

The keywords will look like this:

endurance;
force;
horizontal bar, etc.

You can use Yandex Wordstat to select associations. Then you know what your target audience is looking for.

Audience pain as an advantage

It helps when competition is high, and the product is massive.

First, write down all the possible “pains” of your client. Suppose he fears that the goods will be damaged during shipment. Or it won't come at all. Ideally, there should be up to 50 such “pains”.

After that, the client's fears need to be covered with benefits. For example, tell the person about reliable packaging if he is afraid that the goods will be broken during shipment.

Prohibited Methods

VK cannot:

use inappropriate or intimidating imagery;
advertise drugs, tobacco or alcohol;
refer to age, persuade or address by name.