Internet, January 20, 2016 — Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX), one of the largest European internet companies and the leading search provider in Russia, has begun testing smart banner ads on its pay-per-click advertising platform, Yandex.Direct.
Smart banners are display advertisements with dynamic content that is personalized for individual users based on their interests – coffee machine ads are displayed to coffee lovers, camera ads to those who take an interest in photography. Intended for product advertising, smart banner ads are suitable for most internet stores. They take the form of a template into which information about an item from a store’s product range is automatically placed to target specifically the interests of the viewer. To choose which product to display, Yandex analyses a user’s browsing history — which sites they visited, what they looked for, which products they looked at. As a result, one smart banner can replace thousands of traditional banner ads, helping an advertiser attract new clients and draw back those who visited a site without making a purchase. Advertisers will be able to choose their price and pay only for potential customers on a per-click basis.
After completion of the testing phase, smart banner ads will be available for placement through the real-time bidding auction on partner websites, as well as Yandex’s own services, within the Yandex Advertising Network in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Yandex.Direct has responded to developments in the advertising market by introducing a number of other changes to its service over the past year. These include a new auction model, new ways to attract mobile traffic and new possibilities to promote mobile applications. The service recently started offering dynamic text ads by automatically analyzing site content and creating ads to display on Yandex’s search results pages.
