Targeted ads create demand, search closes it

Targeted advertising and search advertising are routinely set up as rivals. Which one to choose, which is more effective, where the budget should go. The question is wrong from the start. These are two tools working on different stretches of the path a person takes toward a purchase. Audience targeting introduces a product to people who have not searched yet and warms them up. Search intercepts people who have already typed a query. Asking which is better is like asking what matters more on a road trip: accelerating or braking.

For a company selling into Russia from abroad, the question comes with an extra layer. The tools you use at home for each role are not available here. Meta’s platforms are blocked, Google no longer sells ads in the country, and the pair you actually work with is Yandex Direct on the search side and VK Ads or Telegram Ads on the audience side. The platforms change. The division of labour between them does not.

Two channels, two jobs

A channel’s role is set by where the person stands in the funnel, and habit has nothing to do with it.

Search covers a narrow, low stretch. The person has already recognised the need, put it into words and gone looking. They do not need to be told why the product matters. They need to see quickly what you offer and why they should pick you. Search closes a formed intention with the least effort spent on persuasion.

Audience targeting sits higher and works with people who have not typed anything. They are scrolling a feed, they are not looking for you, and often they do not know they need what you sell. The job here is to create first interest: show the product to a relevant segment, name a problem the person has not yet put into words. There is no ready demand to intercept, because the demand still has to be woken up.

That gives a division of labour instead of competition. Targeting fills the top of the funnel with people who are not in search yet. Some of them will later formulate the need and arrive in search already warmed up, and search advertising closes them there. One channel prepares the person, the other brings them to an inquiry. They work as a pair, and neither replaces the other.

How this maps onto the Russian platforms

On the search side, Yandex is the search engine most Russian buyers use, and Yandex Direct is where search demand gets captured. A team that knows Google Ads will find the logic familiar, though the details differ.

The audience side is where Western playbooks break. The default upper-funnel tools of most international marketing teams, Facebook and Instagram, cannot be used for advertising in Russia. Their role is split between VK Ads, the advertising system of the VK ecosystem, and Telegram Ads, which places sponsored messages in public channels. The Yandex Advertising Network, the display side of Yandex Direct, can also carry audience work, which blurs the line: the same account can hold a search campaign that captures demand and a network campaign that creates it. Keep them apart in planning and in reporting, even when they sit in one interface.

Why they cannot be measured with one ruler

The main mistake with two channels is a single yardstick for both. Someone expects targeted ads to deliver the same cost per lead as search, sees that it is higher, and declares targeting ineffective. The comparison is meaningless. Search is the bottom of the funnel and direct inquiries. Targeting is the top: reach, first contact, engagement, a delayed arrival in search. Measuring the top by the standard of the bottom punishes a channel for work that was never its own.

The right order is to derive targets from the business task and from the funnel, instead of wanting the same price everywhere. First comes the history. What the numbers were before for each system and each placement, how long and how consistently the work was done, whether there is seasonality. Then the plan gets a reality check: collect the keywords and the audience targeting options, test the click price, model the funnel and break it down to intermediate metrics. Only after the plan has been compared with the facts do you choose how to scale: raise the budget, add new sources, take on new segments, enter other regions.

In this logic, targeting and search each have their own planned figures on their own stretch, and neither is judged by the other’s standard. A channel stops being good or bad in general and becomes good or bad at its own stage.

What changes when the company is foreign

Foreign teams bring their own version of this mistake: paid social numbers from home become the benchmark for VK Ads, and Google numbers the benchmark for Yandex Direct. Both carry over a funnel that does not exist in Russia yet. A brand that is well known at home is often unknown here, so search volume for the brand name can be close to zero at launch, and the audience channel has more work to do than it had at home.

This makes the history step harder, because there often is no history. In that case the first weeks are the history. Run both channels with their own intermediate goals configured in Yandex Metrica, and set targets once there is local data to set them from. Also note that the delayed effect of audience advertising, people who saw an ad in VK and searched a week later, will not show up neatly in last-click reports. If the reporting only credits the final click, the audience channel will look worse than it is.

You need to handle both

The division of roles leads to a conclusion that is uncomfortable for narrow specialists. Locking yourself into one tool means losing the ability to choose. Someone who only knows search has to stretch it over situations where demand has not formed and there is nobody in search to reach. Someone who only knows targeting drags it into places where the person is already ready and would be cheaper to intercept on a query. In both cases the specialist is selling their only tool instead of solving the business problem.

Working across several channels is about the ability to match a channel to the stage of demand and to the economics of the project, and multiplying services for its own sake has nothing to do with it. Alongside search advertising it makes sense to hold the neighbouring skills: audience targeting on social platforms by interests, lookalike audiences and segments built from page addresses, video advertising and placement selection, geographic and radius targeting in social networks, and the coordination of digital channels with offline ones. One product portfolio often needs targeting for some items, where demand has to be created, and search for others, where it is already there. Only someone who handles both can pick the right combination.

For a company selling into Russia from abroad this has a practical consequence. Hire one contractor for Yandex Direct and another for VK Ads, and nobody owns the split between them. Either give one team both channels, or write down in advance which products and funnel stages belong to which channel, and how each is measured. My own work on the search side is described on the Yandex Ads page, and the audience side on the VK Ads and Telegram Ads page.

Both channels hit the same wall

There is one wall both channels hit equally, and it stands after the click. You can split the roles perfectly, create demand with targeting and capture it with search, bring in good traffic through both, and all of it goes to zero if the person lands on a site that is not ready to convert.

The logic shows in a few plain questions. What difference does the traffic source make if most people do not scroll past the second screen? What difference does the content of the lower screens make if the first one does not tell the visitor why they should keep scrolling? What difference do the campaigns make if the site has no relevant pages and no usable navigation? Traffic without a landing page, content and interface ready to convert is useless. The business needs sales, and a spent budget is not a sale.

For foreign companies this wall is often higher. The Russian site is frequently a translation with the original’s structure and navigation, competing for attention with local sites built for this audience. Audience traffic suffers most, because a person who was not looking for you gives the page less patience.

So responsibility for results brings responsibility for conversion with it. Splitting the channel roles is half the work. The other half is making sure that whoever both channels bring in finds a page worth scrolling.

What to do with your channels

A short route to stop pitting targeting and search against each other:

1. Determine the stage of demand. Either demand already exists and people search for it, or it still has to be created. That decides whose stretch it is, search or targeting. For a new brand in Russia, check the actual query volume for your name and category in Yandex before assuming the demand is there.
2. Separate metrics by funnel stage. Expect the bottom of the funnel and inquiries from search. Expect reach, first contact and delayed arrivals from targeting. Do not judge one by the other’s standard.
3. Build targets from the business task. Base them on history, a click price test and a breakdown of the funnel. If there is no Russian history yet, treat the first weeks as the history.
4. Keep both tools in play. Match the channel to the stage of demand instead of stretching the one tool you know over every situation. If two contractors run the two channels, write down who owns what.
5. Carry the traffic through to conversion. Check that people brought in by both channels land on a page that is ready for them. Otherwise the split of roles was wasted.

Behind the phrase “targeting doesn’t work” there are almost always mixed-up roles: targeting was asked for inquiries at search prices, or launched where demand was already formed and cheaper to intercept. Each channel does its part of the path honestly. The mistake sits with whoever put it on the wrong stretch.

If you want to understand where in your case demand needs to be created and where it only needs to be captured, and how to split the channels accordingly, a free review is the place to start.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• VK Ads help center, audience targeting and campaign setup: ads.vk.com/help
• Yandex Direct help, search and Yandex Advertising Network campaigns: yandex.com/support/direct/en
• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Таргет создаёт спрос, поиск его закрывает