Online advertising in the Russian market offers strong opportunities for international competitors in a large number of industries. For example, digital advertising in Russia and specifically on Yandex, is proven to be more effective than advertising on the leading Russian TV channels.
Below is an adaptation of the Yandex.Direct success story for the travel industry, which focused on Kayak. KAYAK is an international travel price comparison service used to compare and book flights, hotels, and rental cars from different companies. Yandex interviewed KAYAK’s Russian and CIS manager, Andrew Verbitsky, who explains how Yandex.Direct has served as the main tool for advertising to the Russian market from the get-go.
How did KAYAK start and how has it evolved over time?
The team that launched the service already had experience in creating successful online companies in the tourism sector. This team recognized that airline ticket sales were actively growing on the Internet in the early 2000s in the US. Both travel agencies and the airlines themselves were involved. As the number of ticket options quickly grew, it became harder and harder to compare them. As a result, the idea emerged to create a resource that gathered all the information on all flight options into one place.
It was important to get away from any association with airline ticket sales, the team came up with a name for the service that wasn’t directly connected with traveling or flying. The name had to be easy to remember and no bigger than six characters long. The word “kayak” was picked out of several thousand variants.
Today, KAYAK is one of the world’s largest services for searching for prices on travel. Each month we process more than 150 million searches, helping travelers quickly plan the best trip to anywhere in the world.
Why are package tours now giving way to independent travel?
People want to get away from standard package tours and at the same time, they don’t want to overpay for additional services. An online service saves a lot of time because booking or buying tickets only takes a couple of minutes. It’s possible to put more thought into planning out a trip, such as comparing alternative routes, reading reviews, and finding the best deals. Independent tourism is developing around the world, and in recent years, it’s become very interesting in Russia too.
Tell us about KAYAK’s decision to enter the Russian market?
Russia has one of the most promising tourism markets with great growth dynamics. According to our estimates, the tourism portion of the Russian Internet grew by almost 150% this year.
How did you first begin attracting Russian users?
First of all, we localized the product with the aid of our head office in the US. Russia is one of the few countries where international tourism services are noticeably less popular than the local ones. This mandates a different approach to product promotion. Therefore, the second important step for us was choosing the right marketing strategy. Our main channel of attracting customers has always been search engines. So, we focused on the advertising technologies of Yandex – particularly on search and contextual advertising through the Yandex.Direct platform.
Promotion of the service is handled by KAYAK staff who live and work outside of Russia. Why in Russia did KAYAK decide to work with an advertising agency?
Yandex.Direct was a new tool for us, so we decided to involve a local partner who was more familiar with Yandex.Direct– Artics Internet Solutions. We didn’t simply shift all the work to an outside agency, but integrated the agency into our processes. We built a trusting relationship with the agency in which information about the growth and profitability of the business is openly discussed.
How have you organized your ad placements in Yandex.Direct?
In the tourism business, we work with a huge database of search keywords, and it took us over six weeks just to prepare for the launch of the ad campaign. We decided to launch with ads for queries about all of our hotels and destinations, sorting them by country, grade, price range and popularity among users. Now we have 9 million keywords and nearly a thousand ad campaigns. We set up our campaigns taking into account the seasonality of demand.
Which Yandex.Direct technologies or features turned out to be particularly useful to your business?
Templates are very helpful in creating a number of similar ads. They can be easily configured to create similar advertising campaigns for different sites and regions.
Using Yandex’s keyword selection tool, we can follow the change in frequency of queries in different seasons, which is important in the tourism business. In addition, we use Yandex’s offline editing tool (Direct Commander). It’s great for working with a large volume of advertising campaigns.
What results have you achieved through contextual advertising?
From the beginning, Yandex.Direct helped us maintain a growth that was appropriate for our business plan. We configured ad placement, gradually reached our return on investment target and then increased our search marketing budget. As a result, over the last year our business in Russia has grown by an average of 20-30% a month, and this is the most important result.
If Yandex.Direct was a physical object or thing, what would you compare it to?
I’d compare it to a spacecraft that has lots of different levers and switches on the dashboard. If you carefully use all the instruments, it will lead any pilot to their desired goal.
What advice do you have for companies planning to enter the Russian market?
Yandex.Direct became our biggest channel for attracting our target audience. If you are an international player and want to successfully enter the Russian market, it’s essential to work with Yandex.Direct. The usual advertising tools seen in the West will not be sufficient for tapping the Russian market.
This interview first appeared in Russian Search Marketing.
