Advertising in VKontakte: Choosing ‘Right’ Public Pages

According to Mediascope, the monthly audience of the social media network VKontakte is more than 70 million people. That is why, if you promote your brand among Russian-speaking users and your audience is mostly in Russia, the presence in this social media can cover a huge audience. Apart from traditional advertising methods by means of direct targeting, the website enables to promote goods and services in one more way—to followers of certain groups and public pages.

Unlike such social media as Facebook and Instagram where promotion via influencers plays an oversized role and often works even better than targeted ads, such promotion is not developed in VK. Instead of personal accounts, users began actively developing groups and pages in terms of special interests and narrow aspects, and that let them use them as an advertising tool.

In our blog, we will zero in on how you can choose a public page for ads placement.

Making up a target audience profile

One of the high-priority tasks to work with any advertising tool is to find out what audience we want and will be able to cover with its help. So, working with VKontakte public pages is not exception or, more likely, vice versa: you will have not only to determine segments of target audience (sex, age, education, region, etc.), but also find out their pain points, needs, and interests. This is what will let you choose a public page or a group with the most relevant target audience for advertising.

Did you define the topics that are interesting for your target audience? Choose public pages on their basis for further cooperation.

How do you find thematic public pages and groups?

Option 1: make up a list of keywords on the basis of the audience interests and use the function ‘Search communities’. For example, as for a travel brand, these will be both general queries such as ‘travel’ and ‘tourism’ and names of tour operators, aggregators, airline companies, etc. After that, you can manually choose the public pages that, in our opinion, may suit you (further on, we will talk on how to exclude unwanted public pages and groups and to choose the most suitable groups for placement).

Option 2: use services that provide community statistics. For instance, Allsocial.ru enables filtering VKontakte communities by:

• Audience size;
• Type (public page or group);
• Category (in our case, we choose the ‘travel’ category for a travel brand).

In the output field, you can sort out communities by the number of subscribers, reach, visitors, growth (number of subscribes/unsubscribes), CPP (however, the publication cost is available not in all communities, so we do not recommend sorting by this indicator). Apart from that, the platform allows direct messaging to community administrators if the CPP field states ‘Order advertisement’ and you have a VK account where you can communicate.

Option 3: find communities through the ‘Market platform’ in your personal advertising VK account. Enter a budget that you are going to spend on placement, specify your theme, desired daily coverage and minimum number of members in the community; you can also specify a region, sex and age of community members and even choose communities by the desired post coverage.

The pros of such search and placement are that this is an official VKontakte tool and you will work with only checked communities. However, there are some cons, too: firstly, the publication cost will be higher than one when you write directly to an administrator of a community that is of interest for you; secondly, you can fail to find all groups where you would like to publish your ads on the list.

Analyzing communities

After the list of communities is finished, let us evaluate their potential.

Target audience presence

To learn if your potential clients are in the community, check sex, age, and geography of its members. This data can be seen in the ‘Statistics’ tab—most often, this information is closed in communities and must be separately requested from administrators.

Reach

The reach talks about the number of post views in the news feed or on the community board. When calculating this indicator, only unique visitors are counted. What is more, VKontakte does not count a quick scroll—a person must keep his or her attention on a text or picture. Check this indicator in the group statistics, too.

When evaluating reach statistics, rely on ‘Followers reach’ (a pink curve on the graph).

Engagement rate

If the community has people of age and sex you need, check its engagement. ER is calculated as a ratio of user actions to post reach. At that, you can count the ER of a single post and daily ER (if the community daily publishes several posts).

To understand if a group has a decent ER, compare it with indicators of leading communities in this field.

Bots

You can learn the percentage of bots with the help of an app «ВКонтакте»: «Поиск „мертвых“ участников и подписчиков» (Rus. VKontakte: Search of ‘dead’ members and followers). For this, enter the app, insert a link to a community, and press ‘Scan’.

Ads

Analyze advertising publication in the community.

If the public page does not advertise products similar to yours but it seems to you that here is your very audience, you can try and test it.

If advertising posts of your competitors are published regularly there, odds are the group has the audience you need. To get a part of it, stand out of the pack with the help of creatives and unique selling points.

Recommendations

As you could see, in general, the procedure to choose a public page for advertising is similar to the selection of influencers. However, there are some of the finer points that you can study out on your own or delegate this work to RMAA Agency experts.

To get a better understanding of how the Russian online market works, read our White Paper Russian Digital Market Overview.

Follow us in social media