OREANDA-NEWS. February 20, 2008. The ads that Yandex serves on the pages of websites participating in the Yandex Advertising Network become more targeted. Now Yandex.Direct, the ad serving system, can serve ads based not only on the website content, but also on user interests.

What directly reflects user interests is user queries. Around 5 million users make 30 million searches on Yandex every day thus making it possible to target ads to their needs. This kind of ad targeting is a variation of behavioral advertising.

“We have tested user targeted ads on some websites in the Yandex Advertising Network for almost six months, and then analyzed the results considering both feedback from advertisers and data from Yandex.Metrics”, says Eugene Lomize, head of the Yandex advertising technologies group. “Today, we are certain that our advertisers will find this new kind of ad targeting no less effective than content targeting. From now on both kinds of targeting will be used to serve ads on the websites of the Yandex Advertising Network, with Yandex.Direct automatically choosing the more relevant ad to be served to the user. The cost per click may go down at that, but the Yandex partner websites will not lose anything, as the number of clicks will increase, even if at a slightly lower price”.

All personal information concerning user interests is protected by non-disclosure agreement. Yandex does not target ads to private queries (for instance, medical information, dating etc.). Any user can opt out of targeting ads to their interests.

Yandex.Direct is the first and the largest ad-serving system for contextual advertising on the Russian Internet. Ads are displayed for millions of users on search results pages and on the pages of the Yandex Advertising Network. Today the audience of the Yandex Advertising Network is more than twice the size of the Yandex audience.