Yandex. Direct. We analyze the competitive environment


    Imagine the situation. You are developing sites. Good sites for good people. Your advertising campaigns have been working for a long time, you have reached a good ROI level, orders come with an enviable frequency. Everything seemed to be fine, until one fine day we receive a bunch of letters from Direct that we were ousted by someone from our established positions. We go to extradition and see an unfamiliar competitor site in our favorite position. Our natural desire will be to find out what kind of fruit it is and, based on this information, make a strategic decision whether to get involved in the war of budgets (if it is a serious and greasy competitor) or support it from below and help to drain the budget (if it is small things).

    “But this is impossible!” - you say. - “Any system of contextual advertising is guided by the principles of a closed auction and does not provide its advertisers with information about competitors. We don’t know either the key requests of the competitor or the settings of his RK. We don’t know if he uses negative keywords or quotation marks . Most importantly, we don’t know his rates and CTR »

    Calm, only calm! (c)

    In the article I will tell you how, by indirect signs, to find the maximum of strategically important information about competitors, sufficient for decision-making.



    To show on the fingers - we’ll take a specific request from those in which there is high competition and high turnover of advertisers, for example, the mentioned “website development”. The issuance of Yandex may change many times since the publication of the article, so we will consider examples in the screenshots. In order not to make accidental advertising (or anti-advertising) to anyone, the links and company names in all screenshots, as well as all search results, have been removed. I have not visited any of the sites in the issuance and I analyze the advertisers in the issuance of the Direct solely on external factors



    We analyze the use of negative keywords by competitors.


    This is the simplest. We take any garbage request from the semantic core of the site development request. If you can’t come up with a garbage request yourself - wordstat.yandex.ru will help you.


    Companies 1,3,5 books obviously didn’t read and didn’t hear about negative keywords. They will not last long in this mode and quickly merge budgets when any serious competitor appears. Companies 2,4,6,7 behave smarter.

    We analyze the use of quotation marks by competitors.


    Everything is no less simple. We take a crazy request from the ceiling with a known zero frequency.


    Advertisers 1,3,5 have confirmed their membership in the suicide club. Advertiser 6 has a long trash of negative keywords in the campaign. Any non-obvious request (such as ours) lowers its CTR and increases the cost of a click. The mistake is not so fatal compared to previous advertisers, but also leads to increased budget expenditures. Advertisers 4 and 7 turned out to be wiser than all, taking a quoted request - on the basis of primary signs it will be the most difficult to fight with them. More detailed information can be obtained by enumerating targeted requests and checking their availability in the issue. Surely they are smart and careful, given their initially low positions on the original request, they do not overheat the auction. Advertiser 2 has obviously chosen the following tactics - broke this keyword into 2 separate requests a) the request in exact accordance - with a high bid,

    Find out the geo-targeting of competitors.


    Note to the hostess: when you click on a phrase in the budget evaluator or in the interface of the Republic of Kazakhstan, you can see all competitors placed by intersecting phrases. Having found your competitors in this long cart, you can easily find out their geo-targeting.

    If the RC is fragmented into regions, this information will not help you, but a simple conclusion works here: if the competitor does not know about negative keywords, about tricks like crushing the RC, he is not aware of it.

    Find out the bids and CTR of competitors


    As you know, the algorithm for determining the position of an impression in Direct can be simplified as follows: whoever has the higher product of the bid and the CTR is the higher in the issue. It turns out that we have an equation with two unknowns ( bid (unknown) x CTR (also unknown) = position (known). It seems that there is no chance to get to the truth.
    However, take a look! Rescue information lies behind the inconspicuous link “All ads”
    If you carefully read help - then we will find out that:

    Отбор Рекламных объявлений для показа на страницах просмотра всех объявлений Яндекс.Директа и их распределение по страницам осуществляется в порядке уменьшения произведения кликабельности и цены на Клик. При этом порядковое место Рекламного объявления на странице определяется в соответствии с установленной ценой на Клик, т.е. отобранные Рекламные объявления размещаются на каждой странице в порядке уменьшения цены на Клик.




    BINGO! We can see all competitors in decreasing order of click price, excluding their CTR. Comparing the original output with the output on this page, a number of interesting and useful conclusions can be drawn. Of course, we won’t get exact numbers now (to evaluate, we need to launch our own RC in this topic), but conclusions about the relative rates and CTR of all competitors on this request can be made. Roughly speaking, if you are in the third position on the issuance page and, for example, in the fifth position on the “all ads” page, then your CTR is higher than that of competitors corresponding to these positions and this is good. If on the contrary - this is a sign that part of the budget is wasting in vain - urgently start looking for the causes of poor CTR.

    By the way, if cumulative operating CTR and properly configured, Kazakhstan can enjoy the view of how your ad with a tiny rate how your ad with a tiny rate stands in the special placement , and competitors with rates ten times higher tuzhatsya in a vain attempt to catch up with you ...

    If you are not tired - it is possible to analyze the width of the semantic core used in the Republic of Kazakhstan (total audience coverage), the use of synonyms, slang and typos as queries, does the ad sharpen the request for each low frequency, does it use robots to control the Republic of Kazakhstan
    The total information obtained as a result of such an analysis is quite enough for you to make the right decision on choosing a strategy for each competitor. An analysis of other factors will also be useful for making a decision: analysis of information on the office website, analysis of feedback from their customers, data from competitive intelligence (just banal ringing and communication with the manager). This is enough to get the most complete picture of the prospects of a competitor in the market.

    Have a good battle!

    PS. I accept applications from the residents of Khabravsk for detailed probing of competitors in any subject. The results will be published as a similar article.

    Also popular now: