Market conditions cultivate the development and formation of a trend for the automation of targeted advertising in in social networks. Most large digital agencies, big brands and companies that keep up with the times have already exhausted the possibilities for increasing the effectiveness of this type of advertising manually. Nevertheless, the growth of the market for targeted advertising in social networks continues at a rapid pace, so the launch of automation services is beneficial for both social networks and advertisers themselves.
Many Internet marketers and advertisers believe that automating targeted advertising on social networks is only relevant for advertisers who work with large budgets. It is for them that an increase in efficiency even by a few percent plays a significant role. But after conducting a small study of the market for such systems, and talking with some of their clients, we came to the conclusion that automating targeted advertising will help reduce advertising costs, increase conversion and minimize time and labor resources for almost all categories of customers, be it online stores, coupon services, agencies, developers of online games and applications, and many others.
According to forecasts for the development of the advertising market in social networks, experts give various figures for the growth of large and medium-sized advertisers in the direction of "targeted advertising in social networks", about 30-40%. These figures indicate that the competition in the market for these advertising services will only grow and become tougher, so automation is the way forward for advanced advertisers who are thinking about the future today.
Usage automated systems and services is no longer a matter of increasing efficiency by a few percent, and in some particularly competitive topics it is a matter of "survival".
It is possible to identify the main areas in which the use of targeted advertising automation services will significantly increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and reduce resource costs - saving time when creating, editing, copying and transferring ads from one campaign to another; opportunities for audience segmentation; use of targeting by time of day; automated scripts for managing advertisements, tracking conversion and cost per lead, detailed statistics and convenient customization of reports for the needs of each client. And, of course, this summer there will already be systems that will allow advertising to be placed simultaneously in all the largest social networks in the CIS - VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Moi Mir. Moreover, clients will not need to create their ads separately for each network, it will be enough for them to create one, and it will instantly adapt to the formats and requirements of all social networks represented.
The main active players in the market of automation of targeted advertising in the CIS are the systems "R - Broker" and "AdCenter". In mid-May, Begun announced its service for managing targeted advertising, and promises to please Searchberry in the summer. Each system is a complex service with a diverse set of functions and opportunities for advertisers.
“R-broker” is a service for automating contextual and targeted advertising. After making the VKontakte advertising API publicly available, this service became the first unique system in the CIS market that provided automated placement of targeted advertising on VKontakte.
Advantages of this system:
- auto-segmenting ads by gender and age. The "auto-segmentation" operation also involves the reproduction of ads, splitting them by gender, age and geography;
- targeting by time of day;
- automatic disabling of ads - will allow the system to make a decision, without the participation of the operator, to disable exactly those ads that do not meet the quality parameters set by the operator;
- ad quality control function - however, it is not entirely clear how it controls this quality. We have not yet been able to get a response from advertisers about what results they have achieved with this feature;
- adding labels Google Analytics in links when creating ads;
- system activity log - which tracks every action of users during their advertising campaigns.
Each system has its drawbacks, the same applies to “R-broker”. The most critical flaw is the closeness of the service, i.e. the system is not public and is used purely for the internal purposes of the creator of the system - the agency "Registry". If you are an online agency, then to start advertising campaign, you need to provide a download of statistics from your account for the last few months so that managers can assess what budgets you plan to spend through their service. The minimum budget threshold is 300,000 rubles per month. In addition, all advertising campaigns in without fail pass through the “R-broker” agency office and this does not always benefit everyone. "Demo - mode" service provides selectively, not always responding to requests when registering in the system.
Speaking of “R-broker”, one can mean serious functionality and work with large Internet agencies that already work with the Registry agency. In other words, this service is not suitable for everyone.
"Begun" also did not stand aside, and recently launched its service for automating targeted advertising. Since April 25, 2012, accredited service agencies have been able to place ads for their clients on the VKontakte social network directly from the Begun interface.
If you have been accredited by the agency for this service, then to start the placement you need to conclude additional agreement to a dealership agreement. Otherwise, a long string of documents and confirmations awaits you.
The service declares the uniqueness of the provided targeting by gender, age and geography for users of "Social networks", which allow you to address ads only to the target audience and thereby increase the return on advertising.
It is too early to judge Begun's contribution to the development of targeted advertising automation in Runet social networks, but the prospects are encouraging. Like R-broker, the main disadvantage of the service is its closedness.
— the first public service for automated placement of advertising in social networks. The advantage of the system lies in their openness to all advertisers and business owners, as well as their innovativeness and pace of development.
AdCenter provides access to an active VKontakte audience, saving time and resources along the way, thereby increasing the productivity and efficiency of working with advertising campaigns. The service offers full automation and control over the placement of targeted advertising on VKontakte. Using AdCenter is completely free for customers, the company earns on its agency discount on VKontakte. It is also possible to connect external agency offices to the system. Thus, major agencies can save their discounts on VKontakte, and continue to work with their customers by attaching their ads to AdCenter. The system interface is convenient, and most importantly, very similar to VKontakte. It has positive sides– users do not need to get used to the new design and adapt to unusual usability, as other services demonstrate. On May 21, Adcenter was the first among such systems to receive an advertising API [email protected] for testing. From July 1, the creators of the service promise to connect targeted advertising in the social networks Moi Mir and Odnoklassniki.
Any hi-tech web project has its flaws when it enters the market. The system is a bit "raw" - this is expressed by some delays when working with the system and sometimes pop-up bugs, which, however, are quickly fixed by the project developers. But this is fully compensated by a number of "know-how" for working with the VKontakte target, which the service offers. The developers promise to fix all the remaining bugs and shortcomings in the near future.
Some of the advantages of AdCenter:
- bulk adding and editing ads;
- mass assignment and editing of targeting;
- calculation of conversion and cost of CPA
- targeting by time of day;
- mechanisms for automatic quality control of ads - scripts that track changes in CTR, conversions, CPA, eCPM, eCPC, and disable or update ineffective ads;
- automatic segmentation of ads - quick breakdown by gender, age, cities. Thus, it is possible to achieve a significant reduction in the recommended VKontakte rate.
By the end of June, AdCenter promises to expand its functionality:
- synchronization with Google Analytics;
- "VKontakte Media Planner" - for the first time, a tool for media planning of advertising campaigns on VKontakte should appear on the market. It will determine the optimal target audience for a specific advertiser, based on the amount he is willing to pay per click or per 1,000 impressions;
- new scripts for automated scripts;
- an event log that allows you to track all the activities of the system, AdCenter managers, and clients in chronological order.
Also worth noting high level client management — specialists quickly solve problems and provide effective management advertising campaigns.
AdCenter can also work as an agency, adhering to the specified criteria for CPC, CPM, eCPC, eCPM, CPA and providing clients with quality traffic at specified prices.
Below is a comparison table of existing social media targeted advertising management services:
What can we expect from such systems this year? First of all, the focus will be on saving time when creating and managing advertising campaigns, because. according to some experts, this is one of the main advantages of such systems. Probably, all ads created for all the time will fall into the so-called "libraries", so that the client can then simply select pictures, headings and descriptions from those that he has already used. Targeting group templates will also be introduced, which will save a lot of time when managing targeting settings for a large number of ads.
The second important aspect of the development of such systems is the tools for forecasting and media planning of advertising campaigns. As we can see, some of the above services have already taken care of this issue, and they promise to roll something out this summer. Of course, these will be only the first attempts, but by the end of the year, I hope you will be able to set the initial parameters of your campaigns, up to the desired CPA (the cost of one application, order), and the systems will find the optimal target audience for you, set bids, control the progress advertising campaigns. And all this - on several social networks at once. Dream, right?
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The main point of any advertising automation system is the most complete transfer of the mechanical work of the manager (which takes about 90% of the time) to computer program- a robot.
In the case of the social network VKontakte, due to its dynamic development and growing popularity, we have developed not only an algorithm that automatically duplicates the standard manager functions while working with the system, but also based on the experience of automating other systems. Under this interest, we have not only developed a new system interface for customers,
but also opened a whole area responsible only for VKontakte advertising.
In order to implement the possibility of automatic management of VKontakte advertising, access was opened to. As a result, a lot of developments appeared on the market, promising all sorts of benefits for customers who dared to use them. However, there were some excesses: some agencies unfairly used the insufficient supply on the market, which led to a deterioration in the quality of the services provided. In order to inform customers about quality service, a list of authorized agencies has been compiled that successfully cope with the dynamically developing network opportunities. Software complexes, used by partners, also passed the test and were authorized as VKontakte advertising management systems.
Statistics
The automation system permanently collects and analyzes statistics on VK clicks and spend, as well as transaction/conversion/average check data from Google.Analytics. Given that data can be updated literally every minute, ProContact’s software capabilities, relying on API capabilities, allow you to adjust operationally significant parameters accordingly, providing high efficiency even at the stage of launching an advertising campaign.
Ad generation
It allows you to significantly reduce the launch time of a full-fledged advertising campaign, because in the working interface of VKontakte during this time you can manually create no more than 3-4 ads. The system takes the input data as a basis and does not just copy ads and put them on different pages, but it creates new full-fledged ads according to a given algorithm, indicating specific characteristics of a product or service and in full accordance with the image.
In search of an answer to the question “Why doesn’t VKontakte make a similar system for everyone?” you don't have to go very far. 
API is a set of tools for realizing the needs, desires, fantasies of a particular advertiser who really needs an individual approach to advertising automation. For those who don't pay serious losses for a tiny mistake, the standard functionality is implemented in the web-interface.
For a more complete illustration, it is enough to imagine the difference between eating in a public dining room, and in a restaurant where you have the opportunity, after talking with the chef, to describe exactly what you would especially like at the moment.
Update
The automation system constantly monitors that ads for finished goods are stopped, previously stopped when goods appear in stock, they are started, ad texts are edited in accordance with changes in product data on the site, prices are adjusted at the time of change, new ads are added automatically immediately after moderation by VKontakte employees . These settings are available not only to the agency, but also on the client side. This allows you to control all processes and quickly intervene in the operation of the system, in case something seems not entirely clear or not necessary. A kind of duplicate control mechanisms in the autoinstructor's car.
If we are dealing with products targeted at all audiences, but for which individual settings will be required in the future, ProContact can, for example, automatically create an array of ads for each such ad according to the specified parameters.
Time targeting
Despite the fact that VKontakte does not provide the function of setting up advertising campaigns by hours and days of the week, the automation system successfully copes with this, allowing you to individually set up both each ad individually and the whole array, activating them at exactly the specified time.
Finding clients and creating ads
To bookmarks
Oksana Momit, head of mass sales and client service of the SocialKey Ads project, has compiled a list of services for the website that help organize a social media campaign: find potential clients, create ads, optimize images, and track audience actions.
Head of mass sales and customer service of the SocialKey Ads project at Digital Society Laboratory Oksana Momit
Finding potential customers on social networks
Leadscanner is a service that analyzes millions of public messages from social media users every day. The resource finds among them publications in which users are interested in specific goods or services. Search is possible in different areas: sale of clothes and shoes, travel, medical services, financial service, jurisprudence, organization of events.
SocParsing is a similar customer search service. It differs from Leadscanner in that here messages are selected and cleaned manually after a mechanical search. It is also possible to set up targeting by social network, gender, age and some other characteristics. You can search by industry: real estate, tourism, IT, advertising, tutoring and more.
"Limbotarget" - the search for an active audience. Allows you to search for an audience by interests, friends, communities, activities and birthdays. You can also find opinion leaders and communities similar to yours.
Create ads
power editor is a tool developed by Facebook for large advertisers. It allows you to create, edit and publish a large number of advertisements, manage the entire campaign.
Simplebooklet.com is an English-language service for creating booklets and interactive ads. Using templates, you can create a document and distribute it through channels - social networks and e-mail.
Smore.com is an English-language service for creating announcements and newsletters. The system makes it possible to choose a topic: business, event, sale. Created booklets can be sent to some social networks and mail.
Creating and optimizing images
Pablo is an English-language service for creating images with text. The platform offers more than 50 thousand photos, it is possible to adapt them to social media formats.
PicMonkey - picture editing. Using the service, you can resize images and add effects. There is a collage function and large format photos. The system is also available as a mobile application.
ImageOptimizer is a tool for resizing and optimizing images. It helps you optimize photos for email, web pages, or just storage on disk. Service in English.
Targeted ads are ads that are shown to people of a certain age and location. She is shown on social media. Recently launched targeted advertising in Instagram. The benefit of targeting is that the ads are shown to potentially interested people. In addition to age and geography settings, targeting campaigns take into account other characteristics. It's easy to remember, "target" is English for "target".
In our review, we have collected services for working with targeted advertising. We searched everything and found the most best services By automatic control advertising campaigns: Aori , HiConversion , OneRetarget , OnlyTolk . You will see how they differ from each other through descriptions, tables, screenshots.
- How does a targeting ad automation service help you save money?
Why do you need a targeting advertising automation service?
A reasonable question is why rent an automation system if you can set up targeted advertising yourself?
- You manage advertising campaigns from a single window. You spend less time designing, editing, copying and transferring ads from one campaign to another.
- You make one ad and it immediately adapts to the requirements and formats of all available social networks.
- In a few clicks, you can set up ad management scripts.
List of the most famous cloud services for targeted advertising
Comparison of characteristics of targeting advertising services
Overview of interfaces in terms of usability
aori
Tariff comparison
aitarget review
The second guest of our cycle of "reviews of targeted advertising management systems" will be aitarget.ru
In this review, I will try to be as unbiased as possible to the system, but still I will express my general opinion in relation to targeting management systems. Personally, I prefer to work directly with the account in any social network, primarily for the reason that this way I am sure of my performance and I know that the price mostly depends on my actions. As you can remember from [from the review "only sense ]” there is some kind of catch in the systems that does not allow you to play ads as cheaply as possible. This catch is either embedded in the system algorithm, or there are no functional parts that affect the final price.
The main argument for using targeting management systems is the functionality: the ability to create many ads at once, and edit them in bulk, the ability to set the time of campaigns, bonuses to cabinets, etc.
But even here I note that even when conducting advertising campaigns with more than a hundred ads, I did not have a desire to use ad management systems to speed up work. Yes, the process of creating hundreds of ads for one campaign can take an hour and a half, but each ad will be thoughtful and individual.
As for facebook, facebook has a Power Editor and it's so great that if you're a real pro, you won't want to work with anything other than PE.
We will compare Aitarget with the usual Facebook account, which is used by most ordinary advertising managers.
facebook.aitarget.ru
Let's move on to aitarget.ru, the service has an analogue for VK, but today we'll talk about Facebook, because the most important thing that seriously captivates isthe ability to pay for advertising on Facebook by bank transfer!
That is why one of my big clients is now considering switching to aitarget. At first, I actively opposed, at least because I was used to the standard “Facebook Ad Manager + PowerEditor” bundle, where I do the best possible results, but since I understand the importance of paying by bank transfer, I decided to analyze the service in detail in order to dot the i.
My acquaintance with the service began a little in a negative tone, firstly, during the first and subsequent tests, the interface slowed down for me and I constantly had to look at the loading wheel, which of course annoyed me, but this can be attributed to the fact that the service is Russian, and I not in Russia - the signal goes on for a long time. Secondly, I found similar screenshots in the advertising of the service.
Who does not understand what's the matter - AVG.CPA is the price of a subscriber. The price is 83 rubles per subscriber? Even on the most unsuccessful projects on Facebook, I could not achieve such a high rate. The average bid for campaigns is about 20 rubles per "like mark", more often cheaper.
For example, here is one of my usual campaigns, not super effective, but up to 20 rubles.
All this dissatisfaction can be blamed on my geographical position, and on the personal skills of the one who sets up the advertisement. But I want to see rates lower than mine so that I have a reason to use the service.
Cabinet interface
Okay, let's log into the system. We connect our work account and here we have a screen with campaigns. In general, if you have worked with Facebook, then all the data on the screen is clear to you.
One little thing: why is there no possibility of choosing the Russian language in the Russian service? Honestly, I don’t care in what language, but there are those who are simply uncomfortable to perceive all the information in English. According to my experience of learning how to set up Facebook, not all who have completed the training will be able to easily navigate in an office in English, even because a lot of people are minimal those who know the language, do not perceive information in English, they simply translate it into Russian in their heads, and then they understand that it is tiring. Need tojust add Russian.Facebook has it.
But it is possible to view and compare graphs for each ad, for a group of ads, and compare conversions in the form of graphs. Charts are great, but how often do you use them? Although working in an agency, it may come in handy if you need some specialized data for reports. Working as a freelancer with a mountain of clients, I rarely look at charts.
Here's the part that really annoyed me:how to edit daily budget for active campaigns?. After all, the daily budget has to be edited quite often depending on your performance. Overfulfilled KPI today? So we can reduce the budget for tomorrow, underfulfilled today? We increase the turnover. There are many different situations, the function is useful.
On Facebook, editing the daily budget in the campaign does not even take time - just enter the numbers you need, instead of the actual ones, in the “daily budget” column. How to do this in aitarget - just did not find it.
Again, if it is somewhere, it is not at all obvious where. And this despite the fact that I specifically tried to find where it can be done.
Okay, with the office, in general, everything is not so bad. It repeats the functionality of Facebook, with the exception of some details that are more convenient on Facebook. But there are a lot of charts. And design is a matter of taste, here, after all, functionality is more important.
Campaign Creation
To begin with, I wanted to copy the existing advertising campaign, went to the section with ads, marked 18 ads with checkboxes, created a new campaign, for some reason it didn’t let me give the ad set name - I just didn’t click on this section. I pressed “Copy” After a two-minute wait, I got an error, I didn’t want to try a second time. Maybe an accident, but again, unpleasant.
Let's go through the whole process of creating an advertising campaign from 0, and determine how it is more convenient than that on Facebook.
The first thing we see is the ability to choose what we will advertise. And instead of 9 Facebook formats, we see only 4.
Facebook.
So, okay, I understand that "site clicks", "likes", and "post promotions" are the most important in targeting.
They also left “application promotion”, which requires embedding the SDK into the mobile app, Butwhy didn't you leave "responses to the invitation" and "conversions on the website"? ,
On Facebook, it is convenient to create events and pay for each person who joins, and sometimes you need to put the Facebook code on the site in order to additionally track conversions. In short, a controversial decision.
Baguette. Go to the screen with the creation of ads.
Create ads
You can upload up to 20 images at a time, on Facebook only 6 at a time, you can also prepare a large number of titles and descriptions at once. This is a convenient thing, quite standard for advertising management systems.
But I’ll just note that in order to effectively run ads on Facebook, I rarely create more than 12 ads, while the most effective ones (the first 3-4) work, the rest are almost worth it. It's not VK.
You have the opportunity to evaluate appearance ads. For me, this thing freezes tightly and shows only one ad in one format - when switching from "news feed" to "ads in the right column" nothing happens - the ad in the new format is not displayed.
Here no shutterstock image search, as it is done on Facebook .. And one more thing:moving images.
You can't select the part of the picture that is shown to the user, how so? How can you advertise without framing? Do you suggest manually cutting in Photoshop, and then pouring it? I uploaded a picture on Facebook, clicked “move image”, selected the part that I needed. Filling in just like that, I risk laying out cropped faces, half of the sentence, and indeed any part of the picture.
This is very important function on Facebook, because as you know: on Facebook, the main traffic comes from the news feed, and the picture plays a decisive role there.
Little things, but unpleasant.
Audience tuning
Of the pluses, I note that in aitarget you can prepare audiences in advance, and then choose the ones you need from them. A handy thing, it is not enough in a regular Facebook account, so I use Power Editor more and more often.
Now for the cons:
Geography - you can not select areas.Facebook has the ability to specify a circle around the city, that is, the Moscow region, for example. Here it is impossible, we select only cities.
