According to reports based on marketing research of the global Internet advertising market, conducted by the Forrester marketing research agency and the Nielsen marketing company, the effectiveness of advertising in social networks extremely low. The collected data suggests that only 2% of messages from popular brands reach the addressee, and only 0.07% pay attention to messages. In other words, people do not read or even block mailing lists and messages if they are of an advertising nature.

Users prefer to use social networks for communication and entertainment. Marketers, dreaming about the impact on users, do not achieve their results. The study states that only 37% of advertisers are satisfied with a social media campaign. Another conclusion of the report is that the more famous and larger the company, the more successful the advertising campaigns. For small companies, this is a sentence to their advertising budget.

Promising and wide coverage of the audience, targeted impact, realization of the company's potential by 100%, increased awareness rating, interactive two-way communication with potential customers - these phrases make many people spend their advertising budget on social media campaigns. And that's not all: in addition to the budget, you can completely destroy your reputation with potential clients and turn your ad campaign into an anti-ad. For example, it's done like this:

• aggressive spamming of new services and new products;
• minute-by-minute news about the life of your business, about its every breath;
• old, vulgar, tasteless posts from third-party sites.

Very low conversion from the "popularity" of the advertising campaign to the increase in real sales and poor predictability of results - this is the other side of social media advertising that no one will tell you about. This will become apparent only after you blow your advertising budget and get no return.

Social networks provide a very peculiar age sample, where we see a huge bias towards young people. When developing an advertising campaign for, say, a garden tools store, it is not particularly worth waiting for a stream of customers under the age of 25. This audience is not interested in such proposals. Why run an advertising campaign completely outside the segment of your customers? Don't waste your effort and money.

The key conclusion is outrageously simple - the main influx of customers, and therefore direct sales, comes through search engines. By launching a high-quality landing page and driving people to it through, for example, Yandex.Direct, we will get an absolutely clear picture of the performance of our advertising.

Properly configured advertising in Yandex.Direct works like clockwork - the result will be noticeable the very next day, and the correct conduct of an advertising campaign will also reduce the budget for it. Right now Yandex.Direct brings profit to millions of companies, and you are still being told about the benefits of advertising on social networks?

1. Paid traffic- a product offered by the social networks themselves, as a rule, in the format of teaser ads with pay per click. When we say “paid”, we mean that this traffic is officially sold by social networks.

2. - in this case, we mean all the ways by which you can attract traffic to the community. It can be both paid traffic offered by social networks, and various ways independent traffic generation using posting, direct mail (group invitations), etc.

3. Reputation management in social networks- this type of advertising activity involves identifying the structure of opinions of social network users about a brand or a specific product and carrying out work to improve reputation.

Depending on the type, both KPIs and ways to measure them in social networks will differ. So, let's begin.

Paid traffic

For this type of advertising, all the methods of analytics that are used to arbitrate traffic from other sources are applicable ( contextual advertising, media advertising, search engine optimization, etc.). The most popular tool is Google Analytics, the capabilities of which are used to assess the quality of traffic and its further conversion into active actions and sales. However, the analytics of paid traffic in social networks has its own characteristics that must be taken into account:

Alexander Bolshov

1. Synergistic effect. A user who came from a social network, unlike a user who came from search advertising, is less ready to make a transaction. This is because at the moment you showed him your ad, he was not looking for your product, in fact, you yourself created the demand. The disadvantage of this situation is that a person who came from a social network is, on average, less likely to make a purchase right away (for example, he does not yet have the necessary amount of money). But he may return to this issue next time, so tracking of associated conversions plays a special role in social media advertising analytics, that is, the sequence of visiting your site when the user first comes from one source, and makes a purchase the next time, coming from another source. The synergistic effect here is achieved due to the fact that the simultaneous action of several tools: advertising on social networks and, for example, search advertising, leads to better results than the separate use of these tools.

2. Quality quality is different. If you have an estimated KPI that shows the quality of traffic coming from, for example, search advertising (SEO, contextual advertising), it is recommended to double-check it before using it as a KPI for social networks. It’s not for nothing that Google Analytics has a separate section that allows you to look at traffic quality indicators from various social networks and compare them with each other. Why is it so? First of all, this is due to a special behavioral model of the audience that came from social networks, because a person came to the social network not to buy your product - it was you who made him go to your site. This is the fundamental difference from search advertising, where the user purposefully enters search engine in order to find specific item or service that he needs at the moment. In the case of search advertising, the user will be guided by the relevance of the offer to his query at every level of decision making, from clicking on the ad to clicking the "Checkout" button. In a social network, he will be guided by the emotion with which he is associated with the purchase of your product - after all, this is the only way a person can be taken out of a semi-meditative state of viewing a news feed or new photos of friends. It is not for nothing that social media advertising materials use an image, and search advertising uses text. Graphic image includes figurative perception, and the text - only rational.

- bounce rate- the basis for evaluating the effectiveness of a single landing page to which advertising leads. A high bounce rate is the first sign of irrelevant landing page traffic.

- time spent on the site- this indicator is necessary for those sites whose goal is to keep the user on the page for as long as possible, for example, for online games, dating sites and other sites with entertainment content.

- average number of pages viewed- this indicator is interesting for content projects, since their monetization is directly related to how much the user is involved in the content of the site, for example, how many articles he read on the site. Such projects are selling ads on their pages with pay per 1000 impressions, so each page viewed by the user is one impression, which means that you can directly calculate the ePC (earning per click) using Google Analytics data.

- % of traffic conversion to goals- no matter what goal you set on the site (sending an application, visiting the Contacts page, etc.), you can evaluate the quality of traffic in relation to it. This indicator is suitable for online projects, the monetization of which is tied to action. For example, these are credit and insurance organizations (sending an application), bulletin boards (submitting or viewing an ad).

- profitability of traffic- This indicator is used by online stores. To calculate it, you need to install an add-on in Google Analytics ( electronic commerce). Revenue data will also be required from the account of the site on which the placement is made, from Google Analytics or from another source that can show the level of advertising costs. Profitability is calculated as the ratio of income to costs and shows the effectiveness, or payback, of advertising costs.

Attracting internal traffic to communities

Another type of advertising in social networks is to attract internal traffic to communities, the purpose of which is to increase the number of participants and / or increase the activity of those who have joined the community. Both goals lead to an increase in effective referral traffic from communities in social networks (traffic leading to sales) or an increase in sales directly from communities, if such an opportunity is provided and does not contradict the policy of the social network.

The number of group members or page followers;

Number of active users per day/week/month;

The number of retired participants for a certain period of time;

The number of uploaded photos, photo albums, videos;

As you can see, there are a lot of indicators. To understand how they affect ad monetization, you need to answer 2 questions:

1. At what quality indicators of the community does effective monetization occur in the form of further conversion into sales?

2. What sources of traffic to the community and events within the community give the greatest increase in these indicators?

For example, we held a competition in the community of an online fitness store, promising the winner, second and third place a discount of 10%, 7 and 5%, respectively. The condition of the competition is to do as many push-ups as possible and upload a video to the group in confirmation. As a result, 34 new videos were added, more than 100 comments and about 200 likes were collected. During the competition, 8 sales were made based on the traffic that came from the group. Based on these indicators, we can determine what intermediate indicators we need in the community in order to achieve the final goal of increasing sales.

Reputation management in social networks

Reputation management starts with monitoring the current brand exposure on social media. To monitor reputation in social networks, the statistics of social networks themselves are not enough, Google Analytics will not help here either. There are many systems on the market that offer independent analytics of this kind: Wobot etc. To choose which system to use, you need to understand what indicators we need to monitor and manage reputation in social networks:

1. Dynamics of the number of brand mentions. This indicator reflects the results of the media activity of the brand. When analyzing the indicator, you need to remember about seasonality and superimpose the resulting graphs on the graphs of seasonal fluctuations in demand for your products.

2. The number and proportion of positive reviews. The technology for analyzing this indicator is very simple: the higher the proportion of positive reviews, the better.

3. Number and proportion of neutral reviews. This indicator is not self-sufficient. With an increase in the proportion of neutral reviews, a deeper analysis should be carried out in order to establish its nature. For example, this may mean that the audience does not have enough information about the product, and neutral reviews are questions about certain properties of your product.

4. The number and proportion of negative reviews. These indicators allow you to set the relative and absolute share of negative reviews. It should be remembered that the presence of negative reviews in itself is not so bad. It's worse if they don't talk about you at all. In SMM practice, there are 3 main areas of work with such reviews:

Identification and removal of custom-made negative;

Working out a negative review;

As such, acceptable values ​​for the share of negative reviews have not yet been identified, however, as practice shows, if on a forum or in a community there are at least 3 positive reviews (25%) for 1 negative review, then the effect of a negative review is neutralized.

5. The ratio of the number of authors and the number of reviews allows you to identify the concentration of positive or negative reviews on the author, which will help to highlight either a fan of the brand, or a reputational terrorist, and possibly the author who fulfills someone's order for black PR.

Of course, a big plus for a social network analytics system will be the automated ability to determine the sentiment of reviews (positive or negative), since many brands have a large reputational capital and manually counting the number of reviews, not to mention determining their sentiment, becomes quite costly. However, when determining tonality in automatic mode, it should also be taken into account that the system will not always be able to take into account all the features of morphology. For example, if you want to collect statistics on the iPhone 4 reputation, the advantage will be on the side of positive reviews due to a large number wishing to sell iPhone4 in " excellent condition."

Of course, social media advertising analytics is not limited to the above list of indicators, and, for sure, the toolkit will be replenished with the development of technology, but you should always remember that the analysis should be based on concrete figures and facts that you can trust.

If you have only recently thought about advertising on social networks, then this material will be useful to you. Mass Sales Manager and customer service of the SocialKey Ads project of Digital Society Laboratory Oksana Momit told step by step how to start.

In the information age, a product or service that the consumer does not know about simply does not exist for him. Therefore, each company strives to make its products as recognizable and popular as possible. This can be helped by promotion in social networks, where a huge number of potential buyers are concentrated.

Studying the audience

If you are planning, but do not know what to take on, first find your target audience. To do this, study the audience of each advertising platform.

One of the most popular sites not only in Russia, but also in the CIS countries. If you plan to enter neighboring markets, then this site is for you. In addition, it is also suitable when the business is localized in Moscow or St. Petersburg (according to the social network, 24% of its audience is from the capital, 11% from St. Petersburg).

Another feature: goods and services that are interesting to the younger generation are well promoted on VKontakte - it is young people who make up a significant part of the audience. And it's not just schoolchildren and students. Almost 60% of the audience is over 25 years old. As for the division by gender, women predominate slightly - 56.3% against 43.7%.

The most popular social network in the world, promotion here increases brand awareness not only in Russia, but also abroad. The main audience is aged 25 to 44 years. Women make up 58% of users, men - 42%. Residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg use this platform most actively in our country.

traditionally more popular among women (76% of the authors who posted at least one post per month belong to their number). Unlike Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir, Instagram's audience is quite young - the core of users is aged 15 to 24.

Consider these features when promoting your product or service.

Where to drive traffic from social networks

Once you have decided on a promotion channel, think about where to drive traffic from social networks. In other words, decide where the link in the ad will lead: to a website or a community on social networks. The checklist below will help you make your decision.

Choosing an ad format

Now it's time to think about advertising your brand/product. How would potential buyers see it? Should I include an image in my ad? Where should the ad appear on the page? After answering these questions, choose the appropriate ad format.

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It's no secret that any social network today is a huge community of people who spend at least an hour a day in front of a monitor. Most often, each of the participants in any social network “sits” in it for several hours, chatting with friends, watching entertainment content, reading some news, and so on. All this time he remains "within" this site, being a potential advertising contact. It would be foolish not to use different advertising tools to monetize and make money on such a large audience.

Therefore, today advertising on social networks is both a powerful tool for making money (for owners of groups and promoted pages), and a channel for selling their goods and services (for entrepreneurs, business owners). And not to use such an effective tool is tantamount to giving up a powerful flow of customers.

In this article, we will try to learn a little more about how social media advertising works. To do this, we will analyze different formats for buying advertising in the most popular Russian network VKontakte, as well as collect the opinions of some advertisers working with different types of advertising (for comparison of effectiveness).

What are they advertising?

So, to begin with, we will determine what (most often) advertising on social networks is used for. Who buys it and for what purpose? How much money are advertisers willing to pay in order to get their share of traffic?

If you ever went to VK, you probably noticed an ad block on the left of the page. It is arranged quite simply: on top of it is a headline offering a certain product or service, below is a picture with a company logo or “face” - a person representing the product. Text may follow (although this is optional). In fact, the formats in which social media advertising is offered are quite different, and you could meet them all.

To understand who and why buys a place on the VK page, you should understand the audience of this resource. Considering that there are millions of users in this social network, we can say that the audience here is quite diverse, and it can be targeted using different filters. Remember for yourself: you indicate in the questionnaire on the site your gender, age, as well as the place of study and work. Advertisers who need to sell any product can customize their ad to show it to you.

Therefore, the answer to the question of the purpose for which VKontakte advertising is ordered can be completely different, because the audience of the site is different, which means that there are all sorts of product manufacturers - companies that need the attention of all these people.

In other words, social media advertising is used by a wide variety of businesses, from the owners of a local cinema to the largest online lingerie store. Everyone can find their buyer on VKontakte (as in any other network) and “get through” to him with their ads.

Where do they advertise?

Of course, despite the diversity of people spending time on their favorite sites, their age, gender, income level and place of residence, advertising on social networks is also different. VKontakte, for example, has a more youthful focus. And if we talk about Odnoklassniki, then this site is more likely for an older audience. The Mamba dating site is unlikely to be visited by children and older people, as well as those who already have their soul mate. Here you can find lonely, adventurous people. That is, each social network has its own "core" - a group of users united by some common features. You should be guided by it if you are promoting advertising on social networks of one kind or another.

Advertising types

Each social network uses its own advertising format. Often sites work with different types to give the advertiser more tools to reach their client. It is rather difficult to cover all types of advertising materials that operate on the RuNet, so we will talk about the most popular network - VKontakte. Here is the largest audience, and hence the most active market advertising services. Therefore, using her example, we will see what online advertising in social networks is.

Ad block

The classic and most popular, apparently, format for promoting your services is placing ads in a side ad block. The latter is located on all pages of the VKontakte website, and you can see it every time you visit this resource, on the left side. We talked about it a little higher.

This block is configured from the advertising account, available to all users. It allows you to change settings such as payment format (per clicks or per 1000 impressions), audience (gender, age, groups, preferences and many other settings), cost, appearance ads (picture and title, picture + title and text-description) and more. In fact, placing ads on social networks in a specially designated block (which is probably available on all sites, since this is a fairly common format) is represented by a special configurator. It also gives a wide range of options for what your ad will be. Your task is to set it up in such a way as to interest your client, replenish the account balance and start showing ads.

Record promotion

Another interesting option for providing information about your products is advertising records. You can see them if you open the "News" section. Advertising services on social networks using such posts is a common way to promote yourself as "organically" as possible without causing irritation to users.