March 28, 2021 0:00
Interview with an expert: Zen or Pulse - where is the whatsapp number list competition lower and the conversion higher?
Timur Ugulava
Chief Operating Officer Mediasphere
Content
How do Mail.ru and Yandex determine what content to show to users?
Is there a chance that the algorithms will select the audience themselves and we will get free organic traffic without paid advertising?
Who exactly should go to Zen and Pulse?
How does the advertising account work?
What is the difference between Zen and Pulse?
Is it better to publish text, photos or videos on Zen?
What indicators do different topics in Zen show from your experience?
Conclusion
Zen and Pulse are great tools for finding “new blood” for sales. Our agency has a case of “Website Factory”, where the cost of reading was 3 rubles, and the cost of an application from Zen was 600 rubles. This is much lower than from Yandex.Direct.
From our own experience, we have deduced patterns for creatives that can be used in various business areas and get high-quality traffic to the site both in the B2C segment and in B2B.
Before moving on to studying the questions and answers, I recommend reading Svetlana Kovaleva’s article on content strategy for Zen and Pulse.
In it, Sveta explained:
Why did recommender systems appear?
what business problems do they help solve;
How to integrate Zen and Pulse into your content strategy.
On March 12, Svetlana and I held a webinar interview. I answered questions that people ask me about content in recommendation systems.
Read the text transcript of the conversation below, or watch the recording on YouTube .
How do Mail.ru and Yandex determine what content to show to users?
In Pulse and Zen, the algorithms are author-centric — they can analyze and understand which audience segments might find this material useful. For example, we wrote an interesting article about our product and published it on our channel. Then the magic of the algorithms comes — they themselves select an audience interested in our product, show them the article and bring them to the site.
The algorithm tries to determine by behavioral indicators (views, reads) which audience segment the material is suitable for. If it succeeds, it continues to expand the audience and look for even more interested users. But this does not always happen: sometimes an article “dies” before it has time to find its audience.
When you launch an article through the advertising account, you can see how the behavioral indicators increase over time: CTR and percentage of reads. This means that the algorithm caught the segment we needed, expanded it and improved the quality of the audience.
It is important to track the final traffic on the site using Yandex.Metrica. Once we launched an advertising campaign for a brand of kitchen appliances. At first, there were about 50% of refusals from transitions to the site. But the algorithm was trained, and after 2-3 days the refusals decreased to 20%. On our part, we did not change anything, we just found a suitable audience.
It is especially interesting when we work in a complex B2B segment. Our agency has a case on "Website Factory" , where we sell sites through Yandex.Zen.
Is there a chance that the algorithms will select the audience themselves and we will get free organic traffic without paid advertising?
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To get organic reach, we need to write interesting, cool, awesome content that users will read. That's why a story from a boring corporate blog won't work in Zen. Open the Zen or Pulse feed and see who you'll be competing with — these are mostly entertainment blogs.
Before you come here with corporate content, you need to adapt it. For example, we are a kitchen appliance store and we wrote a good article about blenders. The audience found it in organic search results and read it, but they will be reluctant to follow the links to the site.
How many reads do we need to get to get at least 200-300 clicks to our site? According to my statistics, the conversion from reads to clicks to the site in organics is no more than 1-3%.
In practice, to get economic benefit from content on Zen and Pulse, you need to create at least 3-4 good articles a week that the audience will actually read to the end. How much will it cost in money?
Most likely, the economy simply won't work here: we'll spend a lot of time and money on content production, but we won't get any traffic to the site as a result.
There's another monetization scheme: we can put Yandex.Audience and Media.Metrica pixels in each article to collect the audience into a segment and retarget it. Even a one-person editorial team can handle this to create a corporate blog and develop it. But there won't be any direct conversions.
Who exactly should go to Zen and Pulse?
Mass segments with an interesting product, as well as services or services with a full understanding of their USP and positioning.
Does it make sense for local businesses to join Zen and Pulse?
Blogs are read from all over Russia, but a third of the audience is from Moscow and St. Petersburg. If you are from another city, then there is no point in keeping a blog, it most likely will not pay for itself.
Geotargeting in the advertising account goes to the regional level. If we are located in Butovo and we are a small hairdressing salon, then we do not need to go to Zen. If we are the Vesna shopping center in the north of Moscow, will people come to us from the south? Most likely not. But does it make sense to launch an advertising campaign in Zen? Yes, of course, in some cases it does.
In addition to geotargeting settings in the advertising account interface, we can set up geography in two more ways:
Specify the city or district directly in the title: "Black Friday at the Vesna shopping center! Altufievo metro station." Such a title will have a low CTR, since not all people are interested in something that is not in their area. But among those who read the article, there will be a high conversion rate in clicks to the site.
Write at the beginning of the text what shopping center we are talking about. This way we immediately cut off the irrelevant audience, it closes the article and we do not pay for it.
There is a risk that these methods will result in a low reading rate and weak CTR, as a result of which the advertising campaign may stop. We have done such cases - geotargeting optimization works, the main thing is to find a balance. If you have a large local B2C business, then this is worth doing.
Does it make sense for an advertising agency to have a blog?
Any action should be expressed in money, and any result should also be expressed in money. If the ROI adds up, then you can do it. If it doesn't, then you shouldn't do it even if it's a trend.
In general, I am very careful about maintaining corporate blogs. There are must-have industries where Zen and Pulse are highly recommended to be used: banks, auto-themes. Online education works especially well because we can build the final performance, right up to the purchase of the course.
In the case of an agency, I don't see any expediency, because the effect is much greater from an advertising account and, most importantly, the performance can be built there.
How to become a Pulse author?
You can't just register on Pulse and start writing there. You need to get an invite — that's an invitation. Unlike Clubhouse, it's not enough to just get an invite. The content must meet Pulse's strict requirements, otherwise the channel will not pass moderation, will not be monetized, and will not receive traffic.
When an author gets an invite, he needs to write 10 articles, after which the channel goes to moderation. If there is something wrong with the materials, for example, spelling errors, then it will definitely not pass moderation. They will write to you what exactly is wrong with the materials and give you 2-3 months to fix it. If you fail moderation again, then most likely the channel will be blocked. They are strict about this.
To understand what "good quality text" is, read Svetlana Kovaleva's article "5 levels of text editing" .
How does the advertising account work?
In the advertising account of Zen and Pulse, we pay only for the final reading - for a warmed-up audience that has read all the answers to questions to the end and is ready for further communication. But Yandex and Mail Group have two fundamental differences in the advertising account:
To receive paid traffic in Zen, you must comply with the Federal Law "On Advertising" and Yandex requirements. For example, pharmaceuticals were recently allowed in Zen, but medical services cannot be advertised yet.
Pulse allows everything that the Federal Law “On Advertising” allows, so medicine has very actively entered Pulse.
The B2B segment should not expect Zen or Pulse to work their magic and immediately generate conversions. If Yandex.Direct does not have them, then there will be none here either. Recommender systems are used as the first touch, when the audience is not looking for anything yet, and move the audience to the next stage of forming a need .
We can build communication with the audience and sell our services through a chain of touches. As a result, this traffic can become cheaper than in Yandex.Direct. Taking this into account, the B2B segment can safely go to Zen and Pulse.
In complex B2C segments, part of the work of the sales department can be transferred to content marketing in order to warm up the audience from scratch and handle objections. In this regard, Zen and Pulse are unique. The main thing is to be able to catch the audience.
For example, a children's football club faces a bunch of different questions from parents: Why you? Why such a price? What will they teach? What is the coaching staff? etc. We can delegate some of these questions, which are usually handled by managers, to Zen and relieve the sales department.
How do blogs work in a recommender system?
In classic social networks, the feed shows those we are subscribed to. In Zen and Pulse, a recommendation feed works, that is, algorithms find an audience for a specific material. This leads to the fact that we can be seen by people who have never heard of us before, and each blog post can be the user's first acquaintance with our brand.
Zen has a core audience, but it is not very large compared to Facebook or Vkontakte. If you look at the visitor statistics in Yandex.Metrica, you will see that the percentage of repeat visitors to the blog is small.
