Starting September 1, 2015, Yandex introduces a new auction and sorting model for ads in Yandex.Direct.
The Yandex company notes that the changes are dictated by the development of the advertising market. Where advertisers used to be interested in the best ad spaces, now they are increasingly paying attention to the cost of customer acquisition and return on ad spend. However, in the current auction model, the best places do not always have the highest cost-effectiveness.
Recall that contextual advertising in the search “Yandex” is placed on an auction basis – advertisers compete for places in the ad block, setting prices per click. Now “Yandex” uses the so-called “second price” auction, when clicks are paid at the rate of the nearest competitor. From September, the Vickrey-Clark-Groves auction will start operating, in which the cost per click will be calculated taking into account how much more traffic the current advertising position generates in relation to the lower one.
For example, an ad in second place under the search bar gets 10% more clicks than it would in third place. When an ad moves from the third position to the second, only these 10% of clicks will rise in price for the advertiser, and not all, as in the “second price” auction. Thus, the average cost of a click will grow in proportion to the growth of traffic, and it will become profitable for advertisers to bargain for an additional audience.
Also, the position of an ad in an ad block will now depend not only on the bid, but also on the quality of the ad itself. In particular, the new model provides for the ranking of ads within a block based on several factors — click-through rate, bid per click, and quality factor (correspondence of the ad text to the user’s request and the web page it leads to). This will redistribute traffic in favor of those advertisers who make better advertising.
We expect that the new Yandex.Direct model will give advertisers more traffic for the same campaign price and, as a result, increase the return on advertising. Therefore, we recommend that you once again evaluate the possibilities of contextual advertising with us.
