Yandex or Google?
If you have chosen Russia as your next strategic market, you should know several important things about its specifics. We will spare you from talking about differences in people’s mentality and the rest, but we rather want to talk about some online behavior differences that can very much shape your digital strategy.
Any online customer acquisition starts with targeting your audience and traditional way to do so would be building your Google Adwords campaign. Well, this is not the case if you are building online strategy for Russian market. At least, partially it is not the case.
Yandex is the world’s 4th biggest search engine, but in Russia it is the most popular, with over 60% of the market (beginning of 2014 statistics). It is as well the fastest growing search engine in the world, showing unprecedented 28% growth in 2014.
So when you think Russia, you should think both Google and Yandex. Both of the search engines have its own unique advertisement systems. For Google it is Google Adwords, for Yandex it is Yandex Direct. What is interesting is that Yandex is much more popular among older generation (people over 40 years old) and in rural areas. Younger audience and people from large cities would lean more towards Google. But nevertheless you should definitely have advertisement accounts in both in order to reach maximum of your target audience.
What’s more, each search engine has its own sub-products such as maps, email system, apps market, social media channel and many more.
So when you think Russia, you should think Yandex first and then Google. Moreover, only businesses that take advantage of both systems can dominate the market and grow business in Russia.
Our team members have experience in setting up and managing large-scale Yandex (as well as Google) campaigns. We have operated in very competitive markets such as real estate, finance and tourism, which provided us with the valuable insights and technical capabilities that we now happily implement for the benefit of our clients, saving a lot of marketing budget money as well as bringing fast results.
If you have an internal SEM manager that you fully rely on and would like him to manage the campaigns, we will gladly give him a full range Yandex training as well as connecting him directly with personal account manager in Yandex who will be available for you after the training.