Budget forecast in Yandex Direct: how it works

Launching contextual advertising in any case will involve a comprehensive development of the strategy, including targeting the target audience, using key queries, choosing the optimal content format and more. It is also very important to calculate the budget correctly. Of course, any business is guided by the fact that by launching ads it will be able to attract a large number of buyers to its pages, provide a stable flow of orders and, as a result, justify the invested funds, make a profit.

The budget calculation will be especially difficult when you first launch contextual advertising, when the business, and the marketer himself, is just starting to work in this matter, does not understand how the audience will react to such ads. Minimizing empty costs and getting approximate costs for a particular niche, geolocation will help a special tool that is already built into Yandex Direct, namely — “Budget Forecast”. It is completely free to use and allows you to receive data that, for the most part, subsequently proves itself in practice.

In today's review, we will dwell in detail on what “Budget Forecast” from Yandex Direct is and how this tool makes preliminary calculations. Let's highlight a number of factors that have a direct impact on the advertising budget. We'll describe in detail how to use this tool and how to choose key queries for your ads. We'll get acquainted with the key forecast indicators and their values, and highlight a number of situations when this work will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to perform. We'll pay attention to such an issue as optimizing advertising costs and provide a number of recommendations that will allow you to increase the efficiency of using the "Budget Forecast" tool in Yandex Direct. The information provided will allow you to learn how to use this software solution and optimize your own advertising strategy.

What is this "Budget Forecast" tool from Yandex Direct?

It is quite natural for absolutely every advertiser to want to understand at least the approximate volumes of advertising costs before launching the campaign itself. Understanding this, Yandex paid a lot of attention to developing a special tool, which was later called "Budget Forecast". It is quite easy to use and allows you to get predicted data on the cost of contextual advertising depending on what market niche it belongs to and what region your business is located in. You will only need to enter the relevant information, then select the appropriate calculation parameters and enter key queries, on the basis of which the ads will be displayed.

Absolutely any users and business representatives who have an account in Yandex Direct can use this tool. And it does not matter whether there are active advertising campaigns at the moment or not. Experts note that this tool will be especially useful for novice advertisers, as well as business representatives themselves, who have not yet used contextual advertising and are not very familiar with the pricing policy of this niche. Here, literally with a few clicks and a minute's wait, you can find out how much it will cost to promote a particular product in a specific niche and region.

Initially, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that the "Budget Forecast" tool is in operation does not take into account the costs of promotion in the Yandex Advertising Network. Here we are talking exclusively about contextual advertising in the Yandex search engine. Be sure to take this fact into account so that you do not find yourself in an unpleasant situation later when you decide to promote your products through different channels and go beyond the established budget.

A little about how the budget is calculated in this tool

The basis of such a tool as the "Budget Forecast" from Yandex Direct is statistical data obtained from other advertisements that have already been launched in a particular niche and region. The main indicators here are the number of impressions and clicks for a specific keyword. The algorithm processes all this information and takes average values, showing how much it will cost to launch contextual advertising in the same topic.

Here it is important to understand that the rates and competition for displaying a particular ad are constantly changing during each advertising campaign. This means that you need to be prepared for the fact that your actual budget may actually be slightly higher or, on the contrary, lower than predicted. In any case, the final price of contextual advertising depends on the position that the ad will occupy, the geography of the publication, time targeting, and seasonality. It is quite natural that rates may be lower on weekends or holidays, because the audience is not very active at this time, and advertisers themselves often stop their campaigns, not wanting to waste their budget.

When calculating the cost of traffic in search results, Yandex Direct uses the so-called VCG auction, that is, Vickrey-Clark-Groves, as a basis. Here, absolutely all advertisements will receive 65% of the basic traffic volume, while for additional volume, the advertiser will have to pay extra on top based on the rate set by the next competitor.

Factors Affecting the Advertising Budget in Yandex Direct

If you have already launched advertising, then you probably know what a huge number of factors affect its budget. Here are just the main ones:

• Region of launching advertisements. Thus, the cost of advertising will be calculated based on how many other advertisers are placing advertisements in your niche in the same region where you work. Accordingly, the higher the competition, the higher the rate will ultimately be. That is, in cities with a population of over a million, launching advertising will cost you much more than in small towns.
• The keywords used. The cost of advertising will directly depend on how precise the key phrases you use in your ad and their frequency. If you plan to promote high-frequency, that is, the most popular queries, then the price here will be higher.
• The business niche where the advertising campaign is being conducted. Here again, everything depends on the competition in a particular market category. Mass-market products, goods and services popular among buyers are advertised by a large number of companies, which in itself will increase the rate.
• Click-through rates (CTR). And here we are talking about the fact that modern advertising systems, including Yandex Direct, will be more happy to promote those ads that are of interest to the audience. Accordingly, the click-through rate, namely the ratio of the number of people who clicked on a given ad to those who saw it, will be higher. If you manage to achieve excellent CTR rates, then you will pay much less per click.
• Seasonality. Although this parameter is typical only for certain product categories, it is still worth paying attention to. In most cases, demand for most products can change from month to month. It is clear that you will have to pay more for advertising that will be launched during the rush period before the holidays. And again, the reason is higher competition - everyone will want to attract buyers during the "high" season.
• Quality of advertisements. The audience responds with great enthusiasm to those publications that interest them. If your ad is thought out to the smallest detail, original, then people will click on it, thereby increasing clickability. This will entail a decrease in the price per click, which will allow you to win the auction.
• The audience to which the advertising is directed. It is one thing if you are targeting the mass market and quite another if you need to attract people of a certain age, status in society, gender. In most cases, additional audience classification increases the cost of advertising.

Modern Yandex Direct algorithms take into account absolutely all of these factors in practice when selecting an advertisement for display to the audience. The ranking factor here is the quality indicator, potential click-through data, and bid size. Also, we must not forget that the advertising budget itself will largely depend on the overall bid management strategy that you choose as an advertiser. It is one thing if you manually make all the necessary adjustments and quite another if you entrust this work to the algorithms of the advertising platform. In particular, if you limit the average price, weekly budget, cost per click, then all this will have a significant impact on the final costs of contextual advertising.

Minimum advertising budget in Yandex Direct

According to the recommendations of the Yandex Direct platform itself, the minimum possible daily budget is 300 rubles. But in any case, you should understand that real expenses can be completely different. Here, everything depends on what goals you set for yourself at the stage of promoting your product or site, the chosen strategy, the number of audiences that you plan to cover with your ad.

Practice shows that, in most cases, literally only a few advertisers fit into the allocated minimum budget. And if you decide to launch an ad in a competition, a competitive region or niche, then here you will have to allocate much more money. If we analyze the contextual advertising market in Yandex Direct as a whole, we can say that a small local business that launches an ad in test mode needs to allocate about 25,000 rubles per month. But for the e-commerce niche, the amount will be much higher and in some cases can reach up to 100,000 rubles. The same studies also showed that the approximate cost of one click last year was about 25 rubles.

You can also separately highlight the most expensive and, conversely, cheap topics. In particular, the largest financial investment from you will be required to launch text advertising in Yandex Direct in the following niches:

1. Dental services and dentistry in general. Here, the cost per click is approximately 60 rubles.
2. Banking institutions, finance. A click on such advertising is estimated at an average of 48 rubles.
3. Retail trade, design and project work, construction work, repair of buildings and structures. Here, the cost per click is approximately 36-39 rubles.

At the same time, the lowest cost of 1 click was in such areas as the Internet and communications, vacancies and work, agricultural crops, perfumery and amounted to about 8-9 rubles. The leader in terms of cheapness is such a category as books and literature. Here the price of one click is only 3 rubles.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that the optimal budget indicators for a particular niche can be determined exclusively by testing. But still, the “Budget Forecast” from Yandex Direct provides fairly accurate data.

A little about how to use the “Budget Forecast” from Yandex Direct in practice

If you have not used this tool before, but want to estimate the approximate budget for launching contextual advertising in your niche, follow our recommendations step by step. So, initially you need to go to your personal profile on the Yandex Direct service. Pay attention to the panel located on the left side of the main work screen. Here we are interested in such a tab as “Tools”. If you click on it, you will be able to select the “Budget Forecast” option from the drop-down list. We perform further work in the following sequence:

• Specify the regions in which your contextual advertising will be displayed. We have already said that the budget will directly depend on the region in which your advertising is displayed. Here you mark only those cities or regions that are covered by the geography of your business. It is clear that there is no point in launching an ad where you are not present.
• Configure the optimal parameters for calculating the advertising budget. Here you need to specify which billing period will be most suitable for you. Alternatively, it can be 1 week, 1 month, 1 quarter, 1 year. Be sure to pay attention to the currency set by default. You can change it if necessary. If you want to get a budget expenditure forecast from the tool exclusively for desktop platforms, then you need to remove the corresponding mark next to mobile platforms.
• Write down key queries and so-called minus phrases. We have already said that specifying queries is one of the mandatory points when calculating the advertising budget. Your phrases must necessarily correspond to the topic of the business. The most frequent phrases are always more expensive, but they attract a mass audience. At the same time, setting minus phrases will allow you to exclude ad impressions for queries that will not be relevant to you at all.

Directly below the keyword entry window in the Budget Forecast tool, the options "Automatic stop word fixation" and "Automatic phrase adjustment with minus words" will be active. We would recommend leaving these settings, because this way search engine algorithms will not take into account insignificant or service parts of speech, and repetitions of key queries will be excluded. If you wish, you can also set, so to speak, a universal set of minus phrases, including words that carry an informational, that is, non-commercial query.

Now all you have to do is click the "Calculate" button and wait a few minutes while the program processes your query. As a result, you will see the predicted indicators on the screen. If you want, you can additionally download it as an XLS file. You can make adjustments to key phrases, adding new ones, deleting irrelevant ones, thereby adjusting the approximate calculations to your budget. The tool will recalculate automatically. If the site considers that a particular phrase is ineffective during promotion, it will mark it in the list with a gray tint and add a corresponding mark. This means that you can safely delete it.

A little secret: run such calculations during working hours. During this period of the day, Yandex Direct has the maximum number of ads. This means that the calculation results obtained will be as close to real ones as possible.

How to choose the right key phrases for launching advertising in Yandex Direct?

You can experiment with key phrases when working with the "Budget Forecast" in Yandex Direct endlessly. But we would still recommend using built-in hints or additional specialized services designed to collect semantics. If you decide to use hints, you must initially enter the main phrase, such as the name of a product or service, and then a selection of phrases that the Yandex Direct system considers the most appropriate will appear in the window on the right.

If you click on the green arrow next to it, you can add a specific phrase to the window with queries. If you wish, you can also hide the hints or add them all at once, if you think that they all suit you. But it is better not to use the latter option, since the list that the site will continue to contain may contain quite a lot of general queries, that is, those that do not contain a commercial component. That is, you will not receive profit from such transitions.

Working with the “Budget Forecast” tool in Yandex Direct is quite simple. Initially, you will need to enter the first phrase that matches your main keyword. Immediately after that, additional phrases will open in the window on the right, which, in the opinion of the platform, reveal the specifics of your product. If you click on the green arrow, which is provided next to each of the requests, you can add the corresponding phrase to your main selection. If you wish, you can hide the hints, add absolutely all offers from Yandex Direct. In the latter case, you will need to click on the “All fit” button. But still, we would not recommend using the last option, since the platform often offers too general keywords that contain more informational meaning than commercial.

You can also click on the “Select” button inside this tool to also get a set of phrases that will become the basis for developing your subsequent advertising strategy. Let us remind you that you can also use the Yandex Wordstat tool here. It works exactly the same as we described above. That is, you enter the main query, and then you get a corresponding selection of phrases that search engine users entered most often.

Here are a few simple recommendations that will help you quickly and easily select the appropriate search queries to launch your advertising:

1. Initially, select the so-called bases or marker queries. These are the words and phrases that are most often used by the audience when searching for your products. So, if you work with an online store of children's toys, then the most common phrases here will be the following: "buy children's toys", "buy toys for children", "children's toys", etc.
2. Now you need to expand the basic keywords you have received by adding elements of popular low-frequency and mid-frequency phrases to them. Using the same online store of children's toys as an example, we can get queries of the following type: “buy children's toys for a boy/girl”, “children's toys for toddlers”, “toys for children 3-4 years old”, etc. If you work in a certain region, then you should definitely add such a phrase to your semantics, such as “buy children's toys for a girl in Samara”.
3. Now that you already have the selected semantics, you need to carefully check it again, removing low-frequency and non-targeted queries. Then the received phrases are divided into separate groups for a particular audience. Subsequently, you will be able to create several relevant ads for a particular market segment based on them.

Here it is important for you to understand that the accuracy and completeness of your list of key phrases directly affects how Yandex Direct will calculate the approximate cost of your advertising. Moreover, you will be able to use the received queries to develop the ad itself. One more point that I would like to draw special attention to. After you click on the “Calculate” button, the tool will give you the calculation results. But in order to find out the final advertising costs in Yandex Direct, you need to pay attention to the volume of traffic you are targeting. Accordingly, the more people you decide to attract with your ads, the more intensively it will be displayed on the site. That is, the costs will be higher.

What forecast indicators should you pay special attention to?

Results of the “Budget Forecast” calculations from Yandex Direct are provided in a tabular form. Here you can also pay attention to the main metrics of your advertising campaign. Despite the fact that the numbers here will be quite approximate, this will be enough for you to determine the feasibility of promoting a given product or service. In particular, the main parameters are:

• Phrase. This is a list of key queries on the basis of which the advertisement will be launched.
• Average bid forecast. This is the amount that you should approximately focus on when setting a bid that can win the auction.
• Traffic volume. This is the percentage indicator of the influx of the target audience on the official site of your business from the advertisement. So, it is ideal to strive for a value of 100%. So, all the traffic will be only yours. In other cases, you will share the audience with competitors. But in this case, you will have to invest quite seriously.
• The amount that will be written off after each completed transition, that is, this is our cost per click. As soon as a person clicks on your ad, it will be debited from your account.
• Estimated impression data. This is the approximate number of impressions that you can get within the allocated budget.
• Estimated CTR. This is the potential possible share of the target audience that will click on your ad. It is determined as a percentage of the total number of impressions.
• Estimated click rates. This will be the potential number of possible clicks.

Once again, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that here we are talking about approximate figures. The estimated data may differ from the actual ones, both up and down. But you should still understand what exactly you can get from your ad within a given budget.

Based on these figures, you will be able to calculate the cost of your application or any other target action with a fairly high degree of accuracy. Also at this stage, it is important for you to be guided by the conversion of your site or a separate page. You can calculate it by dividing the total number of requests by the total traffic volume and multiplying the resulting figure by 100%. Let's assume that the conversion rate of your site is 7%. So, if you spend 30,000 rubles on advertising per month, and at the end you get 250 clicks, of which 35 are converted into a real request. This means that each such request will require you to pay approximately 860 rubles.

Working with the results of such calculations, you can, if desired, change the traffic volume to see how the final indicators will change from this and, thus, choose the most suitable value for yourself. But it is important to understand that the more traffic you want to attract, the more impressions you will need to launch. Accordingly, the costs here will also be higher.

We repeat once again that this tool allows you to get an approximate forecast for the market that is currently relevant for your region and it may well be that the final cost of 1 click on your ad may be lower than the predicted data. Most often, such a situation occurs in cases where you have created a really high-quality ad that will stand out from the competition and win auctions. In this case, the cost per click will be significantly lower.

Situations when it is better to refuse a budget forecast

But still, it is necessary to use the “Budget Forecast” tool as consciously as possible. The fact is that it will not give reliable results in all situations. The main exceptions here are:

1. Launching an advertisement for a product or service that is just entering the market. That is, here the tool will simply have nowhere to get the initial information to perform the corresponding calculations.
2. Using autotargeting tools. In this case, you trust all the work on adjusting the rate to the advertising network algorithm. This means that it will independently select the most suitable queries for displaying the ad. And it is not possible to predict something like this.
3. Working with seasonal goods or services. In this case, all costs will directly depend on what demand is observed in your market segment in a given time interval. And this means that information for previous periods may no longer be relevant.

By and large, in all other cases, you can safely use the "Budget Forecast" from Yandex Direct.

How reliable is the information you can get from the “Budget Forecast”?

We have already said more than once in today's review that the “Budget Forecast” from Yandex Direct is only approximate information. You should not take it for reliable information. The final data directly depends on the current auction situation, the demand observed in the market among advertisers, the season and a number of other factors. All this has a direct impact on rates, click-through rates, cost per click and, as a result, on the advertising budget itself.

Moreover, practice shows that even with the same settings in the forecast, you can get different data depending on the time period you are interested in. And here the strategies of your closest competitors have a significant impact. It may well be that another company operating in the same niche as you decides to outbid you by paying double. As a result, all the traffic will go to the competitor, and your ad will not receive any impressions at all.

So again we return to what we said at the very beginning - it will not be possible to get reliable figures. Today, there is not a single formula that could accurately calculate the cost of contextual advertising tied to a specific niche. And this means that in any case, you will need to allocate additional funds for promotion. Alternatively, you can multiply the predicted number of clicks by the predicted cost per click, and then add about 50-75% to the resulting figure.

TOP recommendations for optimizing your advertising budget

The effectiveness of absolutely any advertisement directly depends on how well and professionally the campaign was set up, how attractive the unique technical offer of a particular business turned out to be, as well as directly on the content posted on the landing page. Other factors may also have an impact here, but it is still within your power and ability to optimize costs and ultimately get cheaper leads and clicks. Here are some simple recommendations:

• Carefully select the semantic core, excluding non-commercial phrases and words that are not related to your topic;
• Try not to use only high-frequency queries, because promotion for them is always more expensive: dilute them with elements of mid- and low-frequency keys;
• make a complete list of negative keywords that can attract non-targeted traffic, update it in a timely manner: can be used in different advertising campaigns;
• if you see that certain keywords give the highest click rates and good conversion, then review the bid for them upwards;
• don't turn off advertising on weekends, holidays, or at night: it is during this period of time that the bids are often the lowest;
• if you are launching your advertising in several regions, it is better to prepare separate ads for each of them, and also distribute advertising budgets: the most expensive regions today are - these are Moscow and St. Petersburg;
• test various versions of advertisements: adjust the text, fill in all fields to choose the most effective version for the final publication;
• create really high-quality and relevant landing pages, because they will convert traffic into real sales with the best results;
• set up downward and upward adjustments for your rates for certain segments of the target audience.

If you have already worked with contextual advertising, then you probably know that it is impossible to complete all the settings the first time and get an effective advertisement as a result. This means that a comprehensive preliminary study is required, as well as regular efficiency monitoring and timely adjustments. This is the only way to get a result that will fully meet your expectations.

Additional recommendations for using the “Budget Forecast” tool from Yandex Direct

If you want the efficiency of using the “Budget Forecast” tool from Yandex Direct to remain at a high level, use the following recommendations:

• Compare the forecast data with the amount that you initially planned to allocate for launching advertising. In any case, you should get a good return on investment.
• You should evaluate this tool as an assistant in determining the competitiveness of the market, the current situation, approximate advertising results and total costs for promotion. But this is not a solution to all these problems. That is, you should not rely entirely on these figures.
• You should pay attention not only to the number of clicks, but also to other target indicators, including the level of sales and conversion.
• The final table with the forecast will indicate approximate indicators. In any case, it is important for you to see the differences between the rate and the price that will be written off.
• For the most accurate calculations, it is important to select the main parameters, including the region, and also set the most relevant keywords with a commercial component.
• The basis for properly setting up a general advertising strategy is the semantic core, the text of the ad itself, the quality of the landing page. It is also important to create a list of negative words. This is what can subsequently reduce the projected costs.
• You receive approximate calculations, and the actual figures may differ significantly from them due to the presence of various accompanying factors, such as the niche and region of work, seasonality, quality of the landing page ad. Therefore, it would not be superfluous to provide an additional reserve of funds for launching advertising.

It is best to initially launch a test campaign, based on which you can obtain more accurate data on budget expenses. This is what will allow you to evaluate the return on investment and improve the accuracy of the forecast data.

Let's summarize

As you can see, the "budget forecast" from Yandex Direct is an extremely useful tool that provides approximate indicators of the necessary material investments. But you need to use it with caution, evaluate the effectiveness, and carefully work out the ad before launching. And at this stage, mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service will provide you with significant assistance. By following the link https://mobileproxy.space/en/user.html?buyproxy you can find out as much useful information about this product as possible, evaluate the convenience and prospects of its work during free testing. Also, 24/7 technical support specialists will be at your service.

More information about mobile proxies can be found in the «Articles» section.

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