OREANDA-NEWS. August 30, 2011. Yandex starts targeting display ads based on users' demographics. Advertisers on Yandex.News, Yandex.Mail or Yandex.Maps, among others, can now target their offers to the interests of specific age or gender groups in their Russian audience.

To implement demographics-based ad targeting, Yandex developed a new behavior analytics technology Crypta. This technology is based on Yandex's proprietary machine learning method MatrixNet, which is used for calculating the formula for ranking search results. Crypta analyses hundreds of factors like length of search queries, or presence of certain terms. Based on the information about virtually every user's online behavior, this technology processes on a daily basis to classify users as men or women belonging to a certain age group. Learn more about the Crypta technology from this article.

"Grouping our display advertisement audience based on their gender and age is just the first step toward behavior targeting. Crypta is capable of learning how to tell cat owners from dog owners, car drivers from pedestrians," says Lev Gleizer, head of Media Product Development at Yandex. "If different groups of people display different online behavior, Crypta will be able to tell one group from the other."

Crypta enabled Yandex to offer its advertising clients new types of behavioral targeting based on users' online behaviour.