Targeted VKontakte advertising, how to use it effectively and what it is best for

VKontakte has long ceased to be just a platform for communication. Today it is a powerful resource that even combines the capabilities of a search engine and video hosting. This is a platform for search and offers, which is especially important for consumers and businesses. Some can collect opinions and recommendations before becoming a client, others can analyze and accurately find the target audience. Advertising in VKontakte groups today is more effective than the classic one, but it needs to be presented following some rules. Much depends on the right strategy to attract customers. Then advertising "VKontakte" will work.

Advertising in groups "VK" and VK-target

What to choose: target or group

Everything is stricter in targeting: pictures and provocative headlines will not be missed by moderators.
You agree on advertising in the group with its administrator, you do not need to wait for the moderation of the VK service.
The size of images and text is limited in the target, you will not be able to present a case or another version of the advertising strategy.
Choose the right group - get a large coverage of the target audience.
Advertising in VK groups is usually cheaper than target advertising.

However, you should not think that through groups you can sell everything in a row and write whatever you like in an advertising post. This is not true. Your task is to attract the attention of customers, not law enforcement officers. Don't break the law.

Selecting a group for advertising

In which VK groups is it better to advertise? Advertising in a group will be useful if users mostly fit the parameters of your target audience, and the group itself is active and updated with posts and members. What you need to pay attention to if you decide to advertise in a group:

the number of participants and whether it is cheated, what is the ratio of bots and real users;
how often unique visitors appear;
activity and renewal of the group;
geolocation - city, region, country must be suitable for the delivery of your goods;
how many likes and comments: active groups up to 18,000-20,000 members should collect from 100 likes for each post; if the views are single, up to 10 for example, a group with cheats and is really unpopular;
daily audience coverage;
cost of accommodation - the more participants in the group, the higher the cost of accommodation.

How to start an advertising campaign

Sociate - the service offers a wide variety of affordable sites and easy tools for finding clients. On the service page, select a suitable advertising campaign, transfer the text of your post to a special field along with a picture, and create a task. You can go the other way: select "Find sites", enter filter categories to find the target audience for your advertising post, and then analyze the results of the selection. Before placing an order for advertising, check not only the age and gender of the audience, but also the compliance with the activity. If you install the smm-helper service, you will get access to extended community statistics, as well as the number of group members who got banned. The process of placing an advertisement is completed by the design of the advertiser block by the administrator. It will contain data on the number of selected sites, the amount of placement, as well as the number of unique subscribers.
Hollypasta is a free service with a strange name, translated as "holy macaroni". This is an alternative Sociate service, with its own features of placing an order for an advertiser. True, the "holy macaroni" is somewhat easier to use. The exchange allows you not only to specify the parameters of the group, but also to analyze the advertising posts of competitors. The service tools are simple. In the "Community Search" you will have the opportunity to choose from almost a hundred categories you need. You set the “portrait” of your client: age and gender, and then search parameters. You can explore their activity: how many members, likes and reposts. Those groups that will be useful in promoting your product and service can be placed in the "Favorites". The service allows you to track visitor uniqueness parameters, the audience as a percentage, by gender and age, as well as the geography of the group members, the devices from which they enter the community more often, and the sources of transitions: through direct links, through "My groups", "News" or pages users.

Important: admins of highly popular groups cooperate with advertisers mainly through the official VKontakte advertising exchange. The service receives a percentage of the agreement.

Advertising campaign cost

How much does advertising in VK cost in groups? There is no clear pricing policy in placement through VK groups and communities. A separate price list has not been developed by anyone, but some conditions are behind the scenes for determining the cost of a post, and their admins, of course, honor.

Therefore, start placing in medium groups with low pay. With the promotion of goods, the growth of popularity and the number of orders, you can move on to expensive and numerous communities.

Posting an advertisement

How to advertise in the VK group? Having prepared a selection of groups with a suitable target audience, you can begin to negotiate with administrators. Once again, carefully review your post, and then send it to the admin. After his consent, discuss the placement options.

The most successful and proven are the conditions under which an advertising post on the "title" is posted for at least an hour, and then goes into the feed. Here it should not be “moved” by other advertising posts for at least a day.

Already in the first hour or two, you will be able to understand how successful the strategy and group you chose was.

Pay attention to what time people are most often active in the group. You can collect this data in the "Subscribers" section. By setting up the "Now online" filter, you can analyze the number of visitors by time of day or by hour.

Such an analysis can next time, if you decide to stay in this group, “adjust” the post to the most active part of the day.

Create an ad post

Advertising in VK groups will bring efficiency if the post is correctly composed. No matter what product you'll be promoting online, there are a few universal pieces of advertising that are best used.

Making a "selling" post:

Start with a bright headline.
Break the prepared text into several parts: each block is one thought.
It is better that the post contains the entire advertising text. If this is not possible, the most important and compelling information should be kept open.
Add emoji, but in moderation, otherwise emoticons and signs will create variegation, which will repel the user.
End the post with a call to action: “visit the site,” “learn more,” etc.
Attach only high-quality pictures, to each of which add a description of the product and a link.

And do not neglect the analysis of competitors' advertising posts, and also consider the format of the group in which you post. For example, you sell printed t-shirts. After posting your post in the Ayrton Senna group, attach a photo of the driver's T-shirts.

How to make a post effective

Advertising in VK groups largely depends on the effectiveness of the post. How to make a successful post Advertising posts with useful information are considered the most effective. That is, at the beginning of the text you give a couple of tips on a topic related to your product, and then go directly to advertising. It is important to strike a balance here so that the offer does not get lost in points of usefulness, and tips do not seem drawn to the call to buy your products. Advice and your proposal should be in conjunction. For such a post, you will have to think carefully about the title, it should not be flashy, like “Read - buy”, etc.

The advantage of such a text is that, thanks to reposts, it can be distributed and be visible for a long time.

Social media features for your advertising

Focus on trends and relevance. For example, Kissing Day is something you shouldn't miss if you're selling cosmetics. Write an interesting text about kissing, link it to your offer, add pictures and links.

Focus on the audience: a youth group - you can add a slang word or another, for groups of car mechanics, young coquettes, fishermen, etc. - your own rhetoric, thought out and aimed at these users.

How to make money on advertising in the VK group

Earnings on advertising in "VK" is possible subject to the presence of a well-promoted site, a large number of participants and the activity of the administrator. For example, if you do not have your own group, and you are only thinking about its content, then remember that the more the chosen direction covers interested people, the better for the group as for an advertising platform.

It is necessary to think over an interesting design and content. Posts should appear regularly, several times a day. For the initial development of the community, arrange polls more often and be interested in the opinion of subscribers on a particular issue. Don't forget high quality photos. Browse groups of similar topics to understand how to make the page original.

When the group is promoted, make offers for advertisers. Your contacts or contacts of the group administrator should be visible. Place conditions on advertising: the lower the cost of placement, the greater the likelihood of a large number of applications.

Another option: place the group on an ad buying and selling exchange or affiliate network.

"VKontakte": features of advertising

How is social media advertising different? VK advertising differs from placement on classic sites not only in format. In a social network, the advertiser does the analytical work himself: he selects an audience, composes a selling post, counts activity indicators, etc. He is included in the process at every stage, this ensures the effectiveness of VK advertising. This is the peculiarity of this advertising platform, and here the “lazy” business will not last. If, placing on radio and TV, the advertiser is waiting for a client, then in social networks he goes to his audience, adapts to it and adjusts the offer. This format is flexible, therefore effective. Of course, provided that the advertiser has not neglected any of the rules.

We have released a new book, "Social Media Content Marketing: How to get into the head of subscribers and make them fall in love with your brand."

These blocks on the left side are such advertising.

It is called targeted because it is configured clearly for your target audience, including interests, gender, age, education, marital status, geography. And accordingly, it is shown only to those people who are potentially interested in your product or service.

Placement of advertising in contact happens quite quickly and easily, but as in any other business, there are subtleties and nuances here. You can just put up one ad and waste your entire budget, or you can go through testing and find the best options that will work for you.

How to advertise in VKontakte

So, we proceed, in fact, to the practical part of placing and configuring your . Let's go through the whole process from start to finish.We go to the page in contact and click on the Advertising button.

We create a new ad.

A few words should be said about how to write a text that will sell. Perhaps the best formula that has proven itself for many decades and is used all over the world is ODC (Offer, Deadline, Call to Action). That is, there is the offer itself (for example, Patek Philippe watches), the goodies of the offer include a 70% discount, then there is a time limit (promotion until March 5) and a call to action (order now). Such an ad will work MUCH better than just "Buy our watch."

The ad image should be bright, clear, large, so that you yourself would like to click on it. The picture is of great importance for the clickability of the ad, and, consequently, its effectiveness.

We choose the subject of the ad - equipment and accessories, subsection - accessories. Geography - Russia, it makes no sense to indicate the city, since watches are sold in an online store, but they come by mail cash on delivery to any city in the country.

We choose any gender, since a girl can buy a watch for her young man for his birthday, a wife can give it to her husband for some holiday.
We make the age limit from 18 years old so that the ad is shown to a solvent audience, and not to schoolchildren. The upper bar can be set to the highest, there are no restrictions here. Marital status doesn't matter either.

In order to set up targeted advertising in Vkontakte , you need to know the interests of your target audience. Again, since the audience for the subject of watches is very wide, everything here is left by default. But you can choose the interests of your audience yourself, for example, if you sell teapots and your audience is housewives, then in the interest categories you can choose home and family, health, beauty and fashion. Find specific large communities in which women spend time.

Separately, it is worth mentioning about retargeting groups - this is a big topic, which is worth devoting an entire article to. Of course, retargeting will give a big plus for your campaign if it is set up correctly, but it is not necessary for the initial ad setup.

Often, many beginners have a question, how much does it cost to advertise in contact . This point is rather ambiguous and we will also discuss it now.

The fact is that the cost of advertising will depend mainly on the subject of your ad. If you have a narrow focus, say, selling underground drilling rigs for horizontal directional drilling of oil and gas wells, then you will definitely have pay per click and it is better to set the recommended CPC that the contact offers you so that your ad is shown more often.

When testing different ad options, the cost per click will decrease as the CTR increases, but initially, in order to find out which ads perform better, we set the recommended cost per click.

If you have a broad or entertaining theme, then there is one technology that will allow set up targeted advertising in contact.

You create many different ads, with different titles, descriptions and images, set a recommended CPC and see how your ads get rolled out. Those ads that gain the highest CTR (from 0.1% and above) you leave, and the rest are turned off.

There is no special service for posting ads on the VKontakte social network. Previously, it existed, but was abolished due to a large number of spam and messages from scammers. Currently, the VKontakte social network offers users a convenient wall on their personal page for posting all kinds of information, various dialogue systems, thematic communities, subscriptions, and much more. All this will help you place your ad and make it available to a large number of people.

Posts on the wall

The wall, or micro-blog, is the main tool for posting ads and other interesting information. Write eye-catching ad text in advance and find one or more suitable images. Post a message on your wall after setting the appropriate privacy settings in the general settings. You can make ads visible only to your friends, only users of a social network, or all Internet users. At the end of the ad, add a request to repost it - responsive people can send a copy of the post to their wall by clicking the appropriate button, which will increase the number of views of the ad.

Reaching out to friends

If you have a large number of friends in your contact list, try creating a chat in the dialogue system and invite all or selected "friends" (friends) to it at once. Send your announcement to the selected group and wait for a response. You can also ask them to do the same operation, which will again add popularity to your ad.

Publications in communities

Select one or more suitable VKontakte communities for posting an ad. Pay attention to publics specially designed for this, especially those that are most promoted and located in your city. Please read the Community Guidelines before posting. Some of them allow you to post information only on certain topics, and some allow you to do this only on a paid basis. It is better to contact the group administrator beforehand and agree on the publication with him.

Do not spam under any circumstances. No need to post an ad in all groups in a row, litter the walls of other users with it and send it to them through messages. In this case, your page will be quickly banned, and it will be impossible to restore it.

The article will be useful to those who want to promote goods, services or communities using VKontakte publics, but do not know where to start. After reading, you will learn how to select groups with a target audience and compose posts that help achieve maximum conversion.

Audience Revealing

Before looking for communities, find out who your potential buyer is and make a portrait of him.

Identify Needs. Find out what need your product or service satisfies. It should be one thing that brings the target audience together. Polls and forums will help you figure out what customers want.

Learn about interests. Find out about the interests of your audience to determine the topic of the group.

For this task, the Cerebro Target audience search tool is suitable. It allows you to analyze the interests of potential customers of the selected community.

In the "User Analysis" section, insert a link to the group in which, in your opinion, the target audience is a member.

Cerebro will well complement another tool located in the Facebook advertising account - audience_insights. It shows the marital status, position, as well as the top favorite sites of your audience. And if you are studying the market in the USA, then in addition to the above, the level of salaries will also be available to you.

Determine gender and age. Firstly, these parameters will help you select groups with the right audience. Second, make the message in your post more personal. The service from Mail.Ru will help to find them out.

Community Selection

After compiling an avatar of the audience members, collect as many pages as possible that potential customers can follow. For this:

Use the "Community Search" "VKontakte".

Find groups through " Market platform» in your account.

Use third-party tools for working with VK groups, such as Pabler. In order to start the selection, go to the "Publics / profiles" section, subsection - "VKontakte publics".

Community analysis

When you have a decent list of groups on the same subject, check each of them against five criteria.

Presence of target audience

To find out if your potential customers are in the community, check the gender, age and geography of its members. These data can be viewed in the "Statistics" tab.

By gender, age and geo, check the presence of an audience in the group

Member activity

If there are people of the right age and gender in the group, we check it for involvement. This indicator is denoted by the abbreviation ER (engagement rate) and is calculated using the ratio of actions to coverage.

To understand whether ER is normal in a group, compare it with the indicators of leading communities in this topic.

Bots

You can find out the percentage of bots through the VKontakte application: Search for "dead" members and subscribers". To do this, go to the application, paste the link to the community and click "Scan".

The presence of bots is also shown by Pabler.

Usually there are 10–20% of bots in groups. Anything more is cheating

Another way to check the community for "dead souls" is to look at the outflow of subscribers. To do this, in the statistics of the page, look at the number of unsubscribes. A high spike in the unsubscribe graph is a clear sign of a high number of bots.

Coverage

Reach refers to the number of times a post has been viewed in the news feed or community wall. This metric only counts unique users. Moreover, VKontakte does not count the fast scrolling of the entry in the tape. The person must keep their attention on the text or image. You can also see this indicator in the group statistics.

The normal reach rate is 10-20% of the total number of subscribers. If a million people subscribe to the group, the reach should be 100,000 - 200,000.

Advertising entries

If competitors posted only 1-3 times, most likely their advertising did not bring results. It is worth checking it for professional suitability (read about this in the “Composing a post” block).

If advertising posts of competitors are published regularly, then most likely the group has the audience you need. And to get a piece of it, stand apart from the competition with creatives and unique selling propositions.

Accommodation

Through administrator

To post directly:

Find the administrator's contacts on the page. If there are none, write your offer in a message or in a suggestion on the wall.

Agree on the price, time and conditions of placement. By purchasing a package of accommodations at once, you can agree on a discount. But you should buy more than one advertising space at once only in already verified communities.
Choose the time of posting based on the activity of subscribers. If the seats are only available for a low activity period, ask the administrator to reduce the price a little. You can view the activity in the "Pabler" in the "Detailed statistics" tab.

Submit your post for approval. Please note that you may need to make changes. Therefore, it is better to send the entry in advance so as not to redo it five minutes before publication.

Through the exchange "VK"

Publication through the VK advertising exchange is 10-15% more expensive. Suitable for those who do not use third-party community search tools, as the service itself offers placement options. And also for those who do not connect third-party metrics to analyze the effectiveness of advertising, because in your account you can see detailed statistics after the campaign.

To place a post through the exchange:

Create an ad and submit it for moderation.

When the post passes the test, it will appear in the "Active" tab - it can be posted. If it doesn't pass - "Rejected". In this case, the moderators will definitely indicate the reason, after correcting which, the ad can be sent back for moderation.

Based on the given parameters, find groups to place. You can search for them based on topics, budget, coverage, number of participants, etc. However, you won’t be able to find a specific community by name - the service itself will offer options.

Submit a placement request. Your ad will be automatically placed within the time range you specified.

Compiling a post

After you have agreed on the publication, prepare an advertising post.

In the ad, take into account the needs of the audience, tell how your product will solve their problem.

Analyze competitor ads, if any. Then come up with a unique offer and post style to make your creatives stand out from the crowd.

Examine the content of the public in which you plan to post. By learning which ones are the most popular, you will better understand the interests of subscribers. This will help make a more interesting and less promotional post.

Fill the text with emoticons to make it more noticeable and focus on the main thing. Just do not overdo it, the post should look natural, and the emoticons should fit the meaning.

Shorten long links in the text with vk.cc or Google URL Shortener. So the record will take up less space, look neater and, most importantly, inspire more confidence.

The image should be catchy to get your post noticed in the feed, but still relevant to the offer.

Write a catchy headline. To do this, make it the main benefit. If it does not interest the target audience, then no one will read your text, even the most useful and selling one.

Working with comments

Negative. After the publication of the entry, comments will be left under it, and not always positive. Therefore, try to work out all the negativity.

Informational. Also, people can ask questions: “how to order”, “how much does it cost”, “what is the advantage of the product”, etc. They also need to be answered in time.

Outsiders. Any off-topic remarks can be asked to remove the administrator.

Evaluation of results

To make it convenient to keep statistics and analyze the results, create a table in Google Sheets or Excel with the following fields:

name and link to the community,
advertising post,
placement cost,
date and time of posting,
administrator contacts,
number of transitions
the number of applications
ER group,
profit.

See data on transitions and applications in Yandex.Metrica. And to distinguish between your sponsored posts and the communities you host, add UTM tags to your links. Dmitry Dementy opened this topic in more detail in the article: "".

If placed through the VK exchange, in the advertiser's personal account after the RC you can see:

the total number of users who viewed the advertisement, and their distribution by gender and age;
the number of unique users who clicked on at least one link in the post;
the number of users who shared, commented on, or liked the post;
the number of subscribed users, if the community was advertised;
number of applications per group.

To open detailed statistics, click on the corresponding icon in the section of the corresponding advertising campaign.

If you sent an application directly, but there is no way to connect the metric, ask the administrator for the statistics of the post before deleting it. She shows:

overall reach and subscriber reach;
likes, reposts and comments;
the number of users who have hidden a post from their newsfeed;
the number of complaints about the publication;
The number of people who clicked on the link in the post.

Re-placements

If your first few community posts were successful, keep posting. But keep in mind that over time, ad conversion will decrease. Most members will notice your ad after a few placements, so next time they will ignore it. To overcome banner blindness, update your post every few placements.

Test the new header.
Change emoticons.
Change the structure of the text.
Post with a different image.

Give your post a new look and people will start noticing your post again.

For example, I posted several times in the community with this announcement:

The first placement brought ten leads, the second - eight, after the third placement only two applications came, after the fourth - three.

I changed the photo, came up with a new headline, added different emoticons, and the next day I posted in the same group.

Re-placements with a new post brought eight, and the second time - seven applications. Despite the fact that the text of the ad remained the same, only its visual part and title have changed.

Search for new communities

To increase coverage, you need to constantly look for new groups to place. To find similar communities, use an audience intersection tool such as Cerebro Target. In it, you can follow the link to the public in which you have already successfully advertised, find similar ones, where part of the same subscribers will consist. To do this, go to the "Audience search" section, the "Groups with target audience" subsection and insert a link to the desired page.

Groups can be filtered by the parameters you need and download links to them in a text document or in Excel.

To find audience intersections, you can also use free analogues, for example, the application "

More recently, I opened a series of lessons on social networks with a generalizing lesson. There I casually walked through SMM marketing. Today we will move on to more specific actions and I will tell you how to advertise in Vkontakte.

I won't drag out the introduction and get straight to the point.

As you all know, Vkontakte completely changed the design of the site, which many did not like. I somehow don’t care, I mostly use a mobile browser, but nothing has changed there. So, we need to find the "Advertising" button in the page menu, which is on the left, and just because of the new design, I spent several minutes looking for this very button. She is located here:

Agree, against such a background you will not immediately notice it. Click on it and you will see new opportunities and a powerful tool for driving traffic to the site.

By clicking on the button, you will see before your eyes several options for advertising Vkontakte:

Targeted ads;
Record promotion;
Advertising posts in communities;
Special offers in games;

In more detail, we will analyze only the placement of targeted ads, since they are placed most often.

How to place targeted ads?

If anyone does not know, ads are shown under the account menu, that is, on the left and look like this:

There is only one such block of advertising on the contact pages, that is, there are three ads from different advertisers in total. On the one hand, it's bad, but on the other, where is it even more? People come here not to watch ads, but to relax and communicate.

Fine! Let's move on to creating an ad and, in fact, to targeting:

Well, that's all, the ad is created and the advertising campaign too. It remains to save the ad, send it for moderation and deposit funds into the account.

I had one case with VK moderation. I decided to advertise my community, created a campaign, paid for everything, but the moderation did not want to skip the ad. For several days I suffered until I looked at the picture in the banner, there was an inscription: “Yandex.Direct”, and then the moderator wrote the reason for the refusal. The reason was as follows: "We cannot place advertisements where competitive services are mentioned." Interesting, isn't it?

Send potential customers: to the community or to the site?

Above, I said that I would tell you about some of the nuances of VK advertising, namely, where to send potential customers: to a community or to a website. So, we send to the community if:

Famous brand. In the group, you can post informational posts on the topic of your product or service, making your visitors even more interested. But dilute informational posts with selling posts so that the community converts visitors into buyers;
Online store with a large assortment. The same story as with a well-known brand;
Offline business. In this case, the group can also post informational posts, posts with various promotions and discounts, as well as conduct surveys about the quality of service. Thus, you will not only increase your profits, but you will always know the opinions of your customers about your company and improve the quality of service;

We send potential customers to the site if:

You sell goods at a low price, up to 3,000 rubles;
Selling a product that "everyone" buys;

If you sell a product that is not very expensive, up to 3 thousand rubles, then feel free to redirect the client to the landing page (if any) or a site where there is all the detailed information about you.

Who should not advertise on Vkontakte?

I want to warn you, warn you against mistakes and tell you a little about who should not advertise on VK:

B2B business. It is unlikely that people with medium or large businesses will look for suppliers in contact, this is very unlikely. Therefore, if you have a business for business (b2b), then do not go into advertising on social networks;
Medical services. Also, you should not advertise VK to those who provide medical services. Here the story is the same: a person comes into contact not to look for a private clinic and cure his lower back, but simply to take a break from everything, to get distracted;

If you belong to the list above, then I strongly recommend that you use contextual advertising, but not social media advertising.

Indicators when working with VK targeting

CTR - ad click-through rate, the ratio of the number of impressions to the number of clicks on the ad;
CPC - cost per click. This indicator shows the cost of one click on the ad;
CPM - cost per 1000 impressions;
Reach - the number of unique users who saw the ad at least once;
Transitions - well, these are ordinary clicks, as in Yandex.Direct or Google Adwords. There is one small nuance here: the person who clicked on your ad will not see it again;

If you choose to pay per click, the number of impressions will depend on your bid and click-through rate (CTR). The higher the bid and CTR, the more often you will be shown. If you have chosen to pay for impressions, then the ad will be shown more often at a high rate, and click-through rate does not play any role here.

Goodbye!

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