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.
Pros and cons of advertising communities in VK
Pros:
- a large selection of advertising methods for VKontakte communities;
- attracting a target audience that can later turn into potential buyers;
- the ability to select both paid and free advertising methods that suit any advertising campaign budget;
- increasing traffic to the target site or group.
Minuses:
- high competition in most of the selected areas for trade and sale of services;
- advertising queue;
- there is always a possibility of a ban;
- no guarantee of achieving a high-quality result, even with the condition of thinking through all the nuances.
How to run advertising in VKontakte communities
Advertising in the VKontakte community can be no less effective than targeted advertising. What are the ways to place such advertising, how to prepare a publication and choose a community, Ekaterina Tyulukina, leading specialist in online advertising automation at eLama, told us.
Advertising in VKontakte communities is a separate type of placement, the purpose of which is to increase the reach of a potential audience through publications on popular thematic platforms of the network.
Visually, such a publication is practically no different from a regular post in the feed, but it must contain a mention that the post is an advertisement. If you choose the right platform and prepare good content, advertising in communities can be very effective.
You can watch the video from the post on VKontakte
There are three ways to place ads in popular VKontakte communities:
1. Through exchanges. The method involves the use of third-party advertising platforms, such as Sociate, Bidfox and others. Among the advantages are the presence of a large number of filters for selecting communities, detailed visualization of statistics, and the absence of the need to personally communicate with public administrators. However, such placement is usually more expensive than others due to the exchange commission, and there is also a possibility that the community you are interested in may not be registered on the site. Additionally, administrators will be able to reject your ads.
Placement through the exchange
2. Through the administrator. This method is often cheaper than others, since it does not involve paying a commission. It is suitable for advertisers who understand exactly in which community they need to publish their publication. To order placement, you can write to the administrator or in group messages. Next, you need to agree on the time and price, and also send the recording itself for approval.
Posting via administrator
3. Through the market platform - the official and easiest placement channel. The system itself will offer you sites depending on the characteristics of your audience and budget; all you have to do is analyze and choose the right one. When working with this channel, you don’t have to worry about deadlines and analyzing results. You can be sure that the post will be published on time, and you will be able to track statistics over time.
Read more about this method in the material about the market platform.
Before you start setting up a campaign, it is important to analyze the target audience of the product. When studying your target audience, focus not only on socio-demographic parameters, check what the audience is interested in, try to segment it. This will help you better understand what content should be used in publications and on which platforms it is best to post it.
How to submit a publication for placement
Creating an advertising post is the first thing you will encounter in your account. Here VKontakte offers two options:
- Writing with text and attachments means creating a post from scratch. You can set text and attach an image, video, survey, document, and other standard attachments.
- Repost another post - allows you to use existing posts for advertising, and you can add a comment. If you have a post in your community that resonates with existing followers, you can post it and add additional information to it if necessary.
The most important thing when placing advertising on VKontakte public pages is to choose and complete the offer correctly. A well-designed and creative post can create a viral response from your audience, and you can get free reach and traffic (if the post gets reposted). When developing content, pay attention to:
- Nature of publication. Try to make the post really useful and interesting for the reader. The less commercial subtext is visible, the more likely it is to attract a user. Try to focus on how your product or service can help your audience. If you understand that the post is clearly an advertising format, place the main information at the very beginning and try not to overload the text with details. If the reader is not hooked in the first paragraph, he is unlikely to reach the end.
- Competitors. Before you compose an advertising post, take a look at your competitors: what messages do they post and are they promoting in principle? After such an analysis, it will be easier for you to build your offer and highlight the unique advantage of the product or service. How to conduct a quick analysis of competitors on VKontakte, Facebook and Yandex.Direct, read the guide.
- Image and video. When choosing a picture or video, pay attention to quality. You should not use blurry images or amateur photography (with the exception of humorous content). Low-resolution materials rarely resonate with readers and, as a result, have low engagement. Remember that the image should highlight the text and be relevant to the sentence. The text in the image should not occupy more than 20%.
- Emoji. Many advertisers choose to design posts using emojis, and this really makes their ads stand out from regular posts in the feed. However, over time, posts with a lot of emoji began to be associated by the audience with advertising. Before using them in a recording, consider whether they are truly necessary and appropriate for the type of business.
How to choose a community
When working with the VKontakte market platform, choosing a community is quite simple. You need to enter data into the filter parameters, and the system itself will suggest suitable placements. It is possible to filter by several criteria at once: gender and age, community topic, region and others. Options that are not suitable can be excluded.
Selection of communities
There are situations when you already know where exactly you want to order placement and are sure that the community is on the platform, but it is not in the list of available ones. In this case, try weakening the filter, for example, increasing the budget or changing the dates - perhaps the placement has already been ordered by another advertiser at the time you specified.
Before you advertise in any community, you should make sure that it really suits you. To do this, you can analyze the statistics; you should pay attention to the following parameters:
1. Number of subscribers. At first glance, it may seem that the more people, the greater the coverage. However, not all communities have high subscriber activity. As a rule, many users do not log into the social network or read the feed every day, and some groups have bots. Therefore, when analyzing, do not focus on this metric; often it is not indicative.
2. Audience coverage. Analyze the statistics of communities from the list of available ones. Follower reach helps you understand how many users in a community view posts. Full coverage reflects all readers for the period and shows how many views you can get. You can also go to the community and calculate the average number of views of wall posts for the analyzed period manually.
Audience Reach
3. Feedback. Shows user engagement in materials published by the group. This metric helps you understand how “alive” a community is. If you see good dynamics on the “Audience Reach” graph, but feedback rates are low, most likely the community is slowly dying out, and there is no point in advertising in it. The more about, comments and reposts, the more actively the audience reads the published materials and is more likely to react to your post.
Feedback
4. Gender/Age. This graph in statistics reflects the relationship between the demographic indicators of community members. Check to see if your target audience actually dominates it.
Demography
5. Advertising posts. Before posting, it’s also worth checking how often the community advertises and how much core content is posted per day. Some may publish posts quite rarely, but place announcements often. This leads to the fact that participants get used to seeing advertising content and you shouldn’t expect much engagement in such a community.
Instead of a conclusion
After you have launched a campaign, be sure to analyze the results. Track in which communities advertising is most effective, select similar ones and exclude those that do not bring results.
In addition, targeted advertising can be launched to the audience of communities in which advertising was effective (more details about setting up can be found in our webinar). And if you parse them using Cerebro Target, you can find other groups in which this audience exists, or create a look-alike segment to find similar social network users.
Also, don’t forget to experiment with content and presentation. I'm sure everything will work out.
When you top up your VKontakte balance through eLama, you will receive access to Cerebro Target as a gift.
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