Is it worth running ads on VKontakte? Does it work or not? Judging by our survey, it works, but not for everyone, like any other advertising. The result of promotion depends on the nature of the business, targeting settings, and ad design. So the only way to find out is to try and experiment.
There are 36.5 million active VKontakte users in Russia (they publish at least one post per month). There are even more people who just come to watch the feed or listen to music. You can show ads to all of them and sell your products, you just need to choose your target audience correctly. For this purpose, VKontakte has targeted advertising - ads for which you choose the display audience yourself.
In this article we will show, using a simple example, how to run an advertisement for an online store on VKontakte, what settings to experiment with to increase the effectiveness of advertising, and where to look for help if you have questions.
Types of advertising on VKontakte
There are many promotion tools: official and unofficial. The choice depends on the tasks and budget.
1. Targeted advertising - showing ads to users you choose yourself. Suitable for image campaigns and for obtaining registrations, sales, attracting subscribers to groups.
2. Advertising in communities/VK Market platform - advertising in communities: the post is published with the mark advertising.
Advantages of targeted advertising: you can turn off ineffective audiences and ads at any time, and you can analyze the effectiveness for different settings.
For example, you post in a community for young mothers and at the same time launch targeted advertising on VKontakte to the same audience.
Placing a post costs 2000 rubles. Within an hour after publication, you realize that the advertising did not go well: there are few clicks or likes on the publication. But you can no longer return the money you paid for posting: the community administrator fulfilled the agreement - he posted your post. And he is not responsible for efficiency.
In targeted advertising on VKontakte, you could spend, for example, 300 rubles in an hour. And already at this moment you understand that a click costs 50 rubles - too expensive for you. After which you will disable this campaign and try to target a different audience.
In addition, targeted VK advertising is suitable for businesses tied to a specific location: if you work in a small city, it makes no sense for you to be located in a community where there are many users from other regions and pay for advertising contacts with this audience.
The advantage of advertising in communities is higher loyalty; if the group is well developed, subscribers may perceive the post as a recommendation. In addition, when placing advertisements in the VKontakte community, you can come up with an original integration: make a community-style post on a similar topic. This way you will get a better response than just posting.
For example, look at the advertising integrations in the Obrazovac community:
Creating content specifically for placement in this public, and not just seeding: the illustration for the promo and the eyeliner are made in the style of community content.
What should you pay attention to when choosing communities on a market platform?
First of all, on the community audience: topic, activity, involvement, percentage of bots.
The second important parameter is the coverage of the publication; the greater the coverage and the cheaper the cost of display, the better. At the same time, we must not forget about the frequency of publications. The community can publish advertising publications (according to the platform rules) no more than 5 times a day (no more than once an hour), and the number of regular publications is not limited in any way. If a community publishes posts every hour, then even with large coverage, there is a risk that too few users will see your advertisement.
Third, the audience’s reaction to publications in general and, especially, to advertising publications. You should be wary if all advertising posts in the community have approximately the same number of likes, and comments are always left by the same people.
And, of course, publication time. Placements should be made at a time when the audience is most likely to see it. Therefore, you should not stay at night, in most cases, on Friday and Saturday evenings. Sunday and Saturday mornings.
Even after submitting requests for publication in communities, you can cancel a publication that has not yet been posted by clicking the “cancel request” button. Published applications (with the status “Active”) can no longer be canceled.
Targeted advertising on VKontakte
Targeted advertising is advertising that is shown only to a specific audience. On VKontakte, you can tune in to users based on their information from profiles: gender, age, city of residence, interests, subscriptions to communities. It also receives additional information about VKontakte users based on their actions on the social network.
Targeted VK advertising is suitable for developing a community, promoting an event, promoting a video clip, as well as solving marketing problems - attracting customers, increasing sales.
Targeted advertising formats on VKontakte
Advertising in the feed An ad appears in the user's news feed - along with publications from his friends or communities from subscriptions - if the user is part of the audience you define.
Such ads are displayed in both desktop and mobile versions of the site.
Universal post Looks like a regular post in the feed, the only difference is the “advertising” tag.
Post with a button Similar to a regular post, but here a button with a call to action appears (More details/Buy/Call/Book, etc.)
Website Advertising The format is similar to a post with a button, but the image is slightly larger and the text is shorter. The main feature is that when you click on the “header” of the ad, the user will not be taken to the community, as in other formats, but also to the website. To use this format, you do not need to create a community on VKontakte.
Carousel Instead of one image, the user sees a gallery with 3-10 photos and call-to-action buttons under each of them.
Collecting applications Externally, the format is similar to a post with a button, but when navigating, the user is taken not to an external site or community on a social network, but to a questionnaire where he can send contacts.
Advertising in the left block (advertising on site pages)
In the full version of the VKontakte website, the user sees advertising in the left block - under the menu. Here are small text-graphic banners (TGB), which are divided into three types, depending on the destination:
External site
Community
Application
Advertising in Stories
The mobile version of the site displays advertising in Stories. These are full-format ads, which means your ad will take up the entire user’s screen, so it will be harder to miss than, for example, TGB.
VK Publer advertising monitoring service
Publer is one of the most powerful services for working with advertising posts and teasers on VKontakte. This exchange is paid, only 10 requests are available in the trial version. However, you can pay for such functionality.
Rice. 6. In Publer you will find tools and audience settings for every taste.
Here are some of the useful tools of this “monster”:
- search by advertising posts: by text, links, redirects and other criteria;
- search for VK teasers, which takes into account the gender, age and geography of the target audience.
- search by communities even according to criteria that are hidden from prying eyes in the statistics of these publics;
- analysis of communities showing the most detailed information about them, including the dynamics of the number of subscribers, popular posts, activity over different time periods (from an hour to several months).
Business owners using the Publer service will be able to track how and where their competitors are advertising. Publer also allows you to monitor current trends, products and services that are in greatest demand. Publer's capabilities go far beyond the standard exchange and offer extensive tools for running advertising campaigns on VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, and Instagram.
Data is updated here online, and posts on all VK groups are updated within approximately 10 hours. This is enough for maximum coverage of advertising materials, since posts usually last 24 hours before being deleted from public pages.
VKontakte advertising targeting capabilities
There are dozens of parameters available to select the audience to whom your advertising will be shown on VK and partner sites. Let's figure out how to use them:
Geography
Here you can set the settings for where your audience lives. There are two types of geography settings: 1. Cities and regions You list the countries, regions or localities where the target audience lives
2. Select on the map Select a point on the map and set a radius around it (500 m - 40 km), select the type of place - the social network determines by the behavior of users where they regularly visit, live or work, depending on the regularity and time of going online .
This VK advertising setup is suitable for a local business: for example, a kindergarten in a new area or a coffee shop trying to attract employees from neighboring business centers.
Demography
- Floor;
- Age; Select the age of the audience: please note that you can only target users over 13 years old. If you're targeting audiences of different ages, split your ad campaign into multiple ads and set different age settings for each: Ad 1: 15-18 years old Ad 2: 19-25 years old
Since children and teenagers are usually cheaper at auction, you won't have to buy them at the older audience's bid.
- Birthday people;
Check the “Birthday” box if you offer special conditions for birthday people.
If you need birthday friends, tune in to them in the “Interests and Behavior” section - just select the desired interest from the list.
- Family status;
If the user's marital status is important to your niche—for example, you sell wedding cakes and target brides—use this setting.
Interests
The most important section of setting up the target audience. On VKontakte you can tune in to your interests in several ways. For example, you are promoting a sports nutrition store.
Important: at first, use only one type of interest setting. Different types of settings overlap with each other: that is, you get users who fit each parameter. As a result, the audience will be too narrow, and you will not be able to launch an advertising campaign on VKontakte.
- Interests and behavior;
Here you can select relevant interests from a list. They are collected by the VKontakte platform itself - based on user behavior on the social network, in applications and on third-party sites.
This setting in VKontakte advertising is the easiest, but less accurate than other options: after all, the algorithms that determine the user’s interest could make mistakes.
- Communities;
In this section, you list the communities whose subscribers you want to target. This is a more precise setting than “interests and behavior”: if a person has subscribed to the community, he has definitely expressed interest in the topic. This way you will find an audience with rare interests - scrapbooking, owners of cats of a certain breed, wintering abroad, and more.
Excludes subscribers of a certain community - for example, your company's page, so as not to bother customers with offers that are irrelevant to them or that they have already seen.
- Activities in communities;
The setup is similar to the previous one, but here you do not cover all subscribers, but only those who have recently been active in them. This will protect you from users for whom some topics are no longer relevant: for example, a girl subscribed to several wedding photographers when planning a celebration, the wedding has long passed, but the communities remain subscribed.
You can customize your interests even more flexibly in the Retargeting .
Parsers are special tools for collecting user databases based on specified conditions. They help you get lists of the hottest and rarest audiences (for example, you can find users who are interested in proper nutrition, have a cat at home, and are raising a child). Such databases are loaded into the advertising account in the “Retargeting” section, and instead of the settings listed above, you select the loaded database from the list. But this is an article for beginners, so we won’t talk in detail about this method.
- Applications and websites;
Specify the names of the VKontakte applications whose users you want to find.
- Travellers;
Enable this setting to show ads to users who have logged into VKontakte from other countries at least 2 times in the last six months.
- Education and work;
Find graduates (or students) of specific schools and universities (with a choice of faculties), employees of specific companies, or people with the desired position.
The disadvantage of this setting is that the information is based on the data in the questionnaire. Not all users indicate information about their place of study and work in their profile.
- Devices, operating systems, browsers
Show ads on VKontakte to users of certain devices - for example, if you are advertising an application or software. Also, the setup will help you find an audience of a certain income - select device models of the desired price segment.
Important: This setting does not limit WHERE ads will appear. A user falls into the target audience if he has logged into VKontakte several times over the last 14 days from this device. That is, if a person logged into VKontakte from an iPhone, and now opened the social network from a computer, he will get into the audience and see your offer.
Retargeting VKontakte
Retargeting allows you to reach an audience that has already interacted with you:
- A person visited the site - got into the VKontakte pixel database - again saw an advertisement in the feed;
- The buyer left you his email or phone number - you uploaded the list of user contacts to your advertising account - the buyers saw your advertisement in the feed;
- You have collected a user base using a parser - uploaded it to the VK advertising account - users will see your advertisement.
VKontakte retargeting pixel
To start building an audience for your site, create a retargeting pixel. Go to the Retargeting section - Pixels - Create a pixel. Follow the instructions: install the code on the site, check that it works correctly (the “working” status will appear in the advertising account opposite the pixel).
Create an audience based on the pixel in the Audiences section:
Reaching the audience to launch targeted advertising.
When setting up a campaign, keep an eye on the audience coverage forecast in the right column from the settings themselves.
It is important to choose the optimal audience size - a very small audience (up to 50,000 people) will be slow to rotate and quickly burn out. A wide audience may not be the target audience.
You can launch an advertising campaign for an audience of more than 100 people.
Moderation of advertising posts on the VK market platform
The content of advertising entries on the market platform is subject to the same rules as advertising: compliance with the rules of the Russian language, prohibition of insults and profanity, as well as vocabulary related to tragic events. It is prohibited to use images of alcohol or tobacco products, provocatively dressed people, or attempts to deceive users using elements of the social network interface.
Market platform moderators are particularly strict. We recommend that, along with the advertising publication, you send an accompanying message to the moderators, which details the purpose of the product and the advertised object. Also, if the entry is rejected by the moderator, we recommend that you try again on another day.
The composition of the advertising post: text (with the ability to add links, including to VKontakte groups), pictures, videos, and other types of attachments, up to a survey. Please note that the “Short Title” of the entry is displayed only in the advertising account to identify the entry.
The created advertising post must be sent for moderation by clicking the appropriate button (automatic moderation is not provided):
Setting up payment for advertising
The last setting for advertising on VKontakte is the rate and choice of payment model.
On VKontakte, in most formats there are two payment models: CPC and CPM
CPC (Cost Per Click): Pay per click You will pay every time you receive a click on your ad. This option is great for beginners because it won’t allow you to waste your budget.
The bid is affected by the CTR of the ad - the higher it is, the lower the recommended bid for this ad will be.
CTR shows what percentage of users who saw the ad clicked on it.
CPM (Cost Per Mile): payment per 1000 impressions You will pay for every 1000 impressions of your ad, but you will still receive conversions.
CTR here does NOT affect the bid , but does affect the cost of conversions.
Look: you pay for advertising according to the CPM model, CPM = 80 rubles. The budget for the campaign is 1000 rubles.
- With a CTR of 0.15% you will receive 18 clicks for 53 rubles.
*Impressions: 1000 (budget)/80 (CPM)*1000 (CPM is calculated in thousands, and we are looking for the exact number of impressions)=12500 Clicks: 12500 (impressions)*0.15% (CTR)=18 CPC: 1000 (budget )/18(number of clicks)=53 rubles.
- With a CTR of 0.2%, you will receive 25 clicks for 40 rubles.
VKontakte will indicate the recommended rate for your settings. These values are usually higher than the actual ones: try specifying half of the recommended rate. If your ad doesn't work, gradually increase your bid.
How much does VKontakte advertising cost?
The advertising budget depends on:
- tasks;
- duration of the campaign;
- target audience;
- seasonality and other factors.
The minimum budget for replenishing the VKontakte advertising account is 500 rubles. You cannot credit less than this amount to your account - and without this you will not be able to run advertising on VK.
The cost of the results depends on your setup, the complexity of the task, the season - for example, in December, competition seriously increases and the cost of advertising increases.
The cost of a click and 1000 impressions also depends on the settings, but is also technically limited for some formats - for example, in an advertising post, CPM cannot be lower than 30 rubles, and CPC - 1 ruble (for TGB - 6 rubles).
Advertising in VKontakte groups
There are two ways to place ads in groups - through the market platform or by direct agreement with the administrators.
The market platform simplifies publishing a publication - you immediately submit to several communities, and at the end you receive general statistics on the results. In addition, you are sure that the recording will be released on time and that the administrator will fulfill the conditions or you will receive the budget back.
When posting directly , advertising in VK groups is sometimes cheaper (since administrators do not need to pay a commission for using the VKontakte platform), and you can also discuss the post and the terms of placement in detail: for example, release the publication for a longer period or forever, repost from your communities or make a series of posts at a special price.
Getting started with the VKontakte market platform
The platform has its own advertising account; to go to it, you need to select the “Market platform” link on the VKontakte advertising page.
The algorithm for working with advertising on the VKontakte market platform is simple: deposit money into your account, create posts, click the “Submit for moderation” button on the post page, go through moderation, select communities to post, posts are posted, and you look at the statistics.
How to choose a suitable public
Choosing the community where your advertising will be placed is the main point. You need active communities where there are not just a lot of subscribers, but a lot of interaction with posts.
Analyze communities before posting:
1. Coverage of one post
This metric is more important than the overall reach of the community, because the overall reach can be achieved through reposts. Viral posts get reposts and are usually community content rather than ad placements. Therefore, this indicator is irrelevant for your advertising publication.
2. Subscriber activity
If you choose to advertise in VKontakte groups, hoping to get more engagement, analyze the activity of the community before placing ads there.
A detailed report on the analytics of any groups is easy to collect in Popsters: you will see the number of comments, likes, reposts, ER.
Enter the community address in the search bar, determine the dates for analysis (a period of 1 or 3 months is suitable, depending on the activity of the group):
The right column contains summary statistics for the community: number of likes, reposts, comments, views, ER. Compare the communities in which you are going to advertise and choose the most active one.
Is the game worth the candle?
Recently, there have been many would-be promoters who claim that advertising on the VKontakte social network does not bring results. At the same time, they often do not take into account the basic rules for promoting groups and composing advertising posts; they place them in the wrong place when needed, and in the wrong place.
So that you do not lose enthusiasm and do not lose faith in this social network, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the basic statistics.
More than 64.4 million unique users visit this social network every month. Just imagine these scales! At the same time, there used to be an opinion that only schoolchildren were on VKontakte. This is another myth that statistics can easily dispel.
How to advertise in a specific community
Previously, in the VKontakte Advertising Exchange you could choose the communities in which you would post. Now you set only a set of parameters, and the system itself selects sites for placing your post, taking into account your budget. You can exclude communities that are not suitable for you, but you cannot add new ones.
This limitation can be bypassed. If you want to list in a specific community, and you know for sure that it is on the exchange:
1. Look at the number of community subscribers. 2. Try to identify a topic. In some cases, the topic of the community is not obvious, and it is better to find out from the owner in personal correspondence. 3. When searching in the Market Platform, set a large budget to definitely get to the desired public. 4. Enter the data: subject, number of subscribers. The public you need should appear in the list of communities. 5. Remove other suggested communities and place a request.
Or use an extension that automatically selects parameters for searching for a community in the Market Platform.
Exchange Sociate
Sociate is one of the most popular systems for automatically posting advertising materials on social networks. This service offers advertising on the three largest social networks at once. In addition to VKontakte, your advertising can also be broadcast on Odnoklassniki and Instagram. This increases the reach of the target audience and saves time on preparing advertising campaigns and selecting sites.
You don't need to communicate with administrators, arrange placements, or mess around with audience targeting. Simply select the groups you need using a convenient filter, selecting suitable topics, specifying the keywords of your advertising campaign, price range and other search parameters as desired, and then submit a request for placement.
Rice. 3. In Sociate, you can view the statistics of any site before submitting a request for placement.
After your applications are approved by community administrators, Sociate automatically tracks all posted posts and generates detailed reports online with screenshots of postings and graphs. Reports can be uploaded to a CSV table.
Money is debited from the advertiser’s account only after the system verifies that advertising has been placed in the selected communities and only after a specified period has passed, so you don’t have to worry about the security of your budget. In all VKontakte advertising exchanges, campaigns work according to the following scheme:
- The advertiser replenishes the balance;
- Creates an ad that does not violate the rules of the social network;
- Selects sites for advertising;
- Sends applications to selected communities;
- Receives detailed reports with statistics of placed advertising posts.
Community administrators themselves set the cost of advertising, so prices can vary greatly even among statistically similar communities.
Tip: before posting, look at the current statistics of the selected site. Pay special attention to reach indicators and the number of views per day. These charts will help you track the dynamics in the group throughout the day and decide on the time of placement.
Always pay attention to the quality, frequency of content updates in communities and the activity of subscribers, so as not to waste your budget on “dead” groups.
The Sociate advertising exchange differs from many of its competitors in that it provides detailed reporting “live” immediately after the launch of an advertising campaign, which allows you to make the necessary adjustments in a timely manner to both current and new advertising units.
Detailed reports in the form of graphs and tables show the advertiser such indicators as CPC, CPM, engagement rate, clicks on external links and the socio-demographic portrait of users, as well as automatic screenshots of placed advertisements.
The application may be rejected automatically if the community admin does not have time to accept it before the specified time. This situation can be avoided by checking the box next to “Exclude “Sleepyhead”” when searching for sites.
Rice. 4. A convenient advanced filter of the Sociate service helps advertisers very quickly find suitable advertising platforms in VK.
To save time, creating large-scale advertising campaigns in Sociate can be entrusted to the service manager. Select sites in one of two ways: either find them using a filter and send proposals to administrators selectively, or create a task with a list of requirements for communities, and the administrators who are interested in it will respond to it themselves.
If for some reason you have not spent your advertising budget and want to withdraw the remaining funds, write to the service’s technical support and the money will be returned to you.
To increase security on the Sociate advertising exchange, we recommend enabling two-factor authentication using a mobile device; this can be done in the “Security” section.
The Sociate exchange has a small drawback: the service does not always correctly display clicks on links within VK and screenshots of closed communities are not displayed in reports.
Analysis of advertising campaign results
When using any tool, it is important to analyze the results. In addition to the built-in VKontakte statistics, collect reports in a format convenient for you - for example, in Excel. Compare the effectiveness of different tools with each other: targeted advertising and advertising in groups, advertising on VKontakte and advertising on Facebook.
Rules for analytics of advertising campaigns:
- Focus on target metrics;
If you attracted traffic to the site, evaluate the quantity, cost and quality of traffic. In this case, other metrics (reach, impressions, etc.) are less relevant to you.
- Collect data for analysis;
Don’t take on analytics right after the start—wait until you get enough results (on average 50 targeted actions).
- Analyze data “as of yesterday”.
The statistics of most tools, although they work in real time, still provide data with a slight delay. Therefore, it is better to collect objective indicators 5-6 hours after the end of the analyzed period: for example, in the morning until yesterday.
Useful articles on a similar topic:
- What is retargeting in social networks and features of proper configuration;
- Examples of successful targeted advertising on social networks.
How to determine the target audience?
Let's look at how to create a portrait of an ideal subscriber using the example of a commercial public page.
Let's say you need to promote a group of the Okna Plus company, which, as you might guess, is promoting plastic windows. So, step by step we ask ourselves the following questions.
3 questions to determine the portrait of your target audience
- What segment do you operate in? First, decide in which segment you plan to work: B2B or B2C. Simply put, these are individuals or companies.
- What is the purpose of the purchase? Why is your product or service needed? What customer pain points do they solve? Why is it profitable for him to buy from you?
- Who is your buyer? Determine the age, gender, marital status of potential subscribers? Consider their needs, interests, desires, hobbies. Even if we are talking about B2B, you will have to deal with people. Therefore, find out in advance who most often makes the decision. This will allow you to determine his needs and correctly draw up a promotion strategy.
These questions provide a basic understanding of your target audience. They also apply if you are promoting a public page on Instagram.
But before you start promoting a group in contact, it is advisable to segment all potential subscribers into different types with a detailed description of their needs. This will allow you to develop a cool content plan with posts that will reach the group members as much as possible. That is, they will begin to be active in the form of reposts and comments, which will speed up the promotion process.
We will talk about design rules, content plan and posts later. And now I propose to move on to the most pressing topic. How can you still attract visitors to the group?
