Geo-Targeting for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

As recently as 2016, Yandex Direct and VK ads could only be targeted by region. This meant spending more on less efficient advertising: paying to reach irrelevant audiences and building campaigns around lower-volume search queries.

Only 30% of people in Saint Petersburg may be interested in visiting a restaurant in a particular neighbourhood. Wordstat data also showed that people searched for “restaurant on Vosstaniya Street” 3.5 times less often than for “restaurant in the city centre”.

Location-based ad targeting addressed these issues when it became available in early 2017. By setting a radius, businesses can show ads only to people within that area.

Geo-targeting shows ads to people near the place being promoted. It can help local businesses such as cafés, medical centres, hostels and small shops.

Geo-targeting goals generally fall into two groups: performance and brand awareness. Performance campaigns aim to bring visitors to a website and increase enquiries; brand campaigns aim to improve recognition and awareness.

To increase sales:

• Allocate reach budget to people near the business or within the target area, street or neighbourhood.
• Use location pins and a radius to promote popular search terms in search engines.

To increase brand awareness:

• Show display ads to people within a set radius of a local business—for example, two or three kilometres.
• Promote branded content on social media to people based on the places they visit regularly.

To illustrate how the service works and what it can do, we will set up a VK campaign for the Klever café in Saint Petersburg.

VK’s advertising platform lets you set one or more map pins and choose an audience radius from 500 metres to 40 kilometres. You can also define how recently people visited the location: regularly, currently, within a set number of days, or during the past week, month or three months. To narrow the audience further, you can select gender, age, family status and interests.

We placed a pin at the café and set a two-kilometre radius. We also selected people who work within that area, so the ads could speak more directly to them—for example, by promoting the café’s business lunches.

We also chose a target age range of 25 to 30 and interests such as business, active leisure and health. This can help define the audience more precisely and improve campaign relevance.

For a local business, geo-targeting can help increase enquiries and sales while building brand awareness. You can extend the campaign by showing ads to people who:

• Visit nearby places. For example, promote healthy meal services to people who go to fitness clubs, or lunch discounts to employees of a business centre.
• Use nearby competitors. If you offer better service, quality or pricing, they may be interested in your business.
• Regularly encounter a particular situation, such as driving along a road with frequent accidents.
• Use Yandex, Google or 2GIS maps. These services offer free and paid placement, including visibility in general listings or at the top of search results.

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