Advertising on VKontakte is one of the most common types SMM promotion. People have long realized that advertising on social networks is profitable and convenient. But, like any other site, there are rules here that must be followed, otherwise your ads simply will not pass moderation.
It is about the rules and requirements for placing VK advertising that we will talk today.
What are the rules?
Every advertiser should know or at least become familiar with the rules and requirements, so that in the future he will not have questions about why this or that ad was rejected, why certain penalties were applied to it, etc. If
In addition to the legislation of the Russian Federation, the basis of the rules also includes the policy of the site itself, which is what they write to us in paragraph 1: “An advertisement must comply with the Rules for using the VKontakte site, the Rules of competitions.”
It is important to understand that these rules are regularly adjusted in accordance with changes in the legislation of the Russian Federation, site policy or for other reasons.
The site reserves the right to make changes without the consent of users and not notify them of the work done. Therefore, always be on your guard and constantly monitor the current set of rules.
VK advertising rules
What happens if you don’t follow the official VKontakte advertising rules?
To open the current rules for placing advertisements and posts, you must go to your personal advertising account ( https://vk.com/ads?act=office), and then click on the “Rules” tab on the left.
Let's take a closer look at all the points:
P.1 – Rules for using the VK website and advertisements
We have already touched on this point. This states that advertisements must not violate and must comply with the law.
P.2 – Text length and image format
All advertisements must comply technical requirements. You can get acquainted with them in more detail by following the link. There are no pitfalls here. Basically, these requirements include the format and size of images, length of texts, etc.
Clause 2.1 – Ads must be literate
The text of your advertisements must comply with Russian language standards. It must be correctly written and free of grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors. Unless the mistake is part of a marketing ploy.
According to this paragraph, you will not be able to highlight words in the text by using capital letters(for example, DISCOUNTS) or due to punctuation marks and special characters(for example, ++!!!Attention!!!++). Ads with such text will not pass moderation.
Clause 2.2 – about the requirements for images in VKontakte advertisements
This paragraph talks about images. They must be clear, that is high quality. Should not contain “explicit, frightening or aesthetically unacceptable images”, as well as alcohol and tobacco products during their consumption.
If you use text, it should be highly readable and not exceed 50% of the entire image.
Well, among other things, you cannot use logos and other attributes of your competitors.
P.2.3 – Page content, text and image of the advertisement
This clause states that the content of the site must correspond to what you are advertising.
Such advertisements will not be moderated.
VKontakte carefully checks advertised sites and imposes penalties on sites for violating this clause. Therefore, there is no need to deceive anyone. If anyone is now thinking about replacing the site’s content, immediately read point 5.
P.2.4 Subject of the object for advertising
This says that when creating ads, you must specify the correct subject. Or such an ad may not pass moderation.
P.2.5 What is prohibited in VKontakte advertisements?
This clause prohibits the use of profanity and references to tragic events. We think that everything is clear with this point. No unnecessary comments are needed.
Clause 2.6 – Imitation of interface elements is prohibited
This item prohibits simulating interface elements. That is, for example, you cannot use a picture with a “Buy” button, although in fact it is not there.
It is important to understand here that the word “buy” (or any other word) itself is not prohibited. You can place it on an image to grab people's attention or get them to click on your ad. The main thing is that it should not be designed as a non-existent button.
P.2.7 – Show respect for competitors
Don't compare your product to your competitors' products. Purposefully belittling the qualities of similar competitive products may result in you not passing moderation. This may work in some isolated cases, but not always.
Clause 2.8 – Personal data and VKontakte
It is prohibited in advertisements to use personal data of users and to contact them using personal characteristics (for example, name, age, etc.).
For example, the headlines “Alexander, this is exactly what you need!” or “Are you 30?” will not pass moderation.
P.3 – What is prohibited from advertising on the VKontakte website?
Clause number 3 of these rules lists objects that are prohibited from advertising.
Sometimes this happens when your ads fall under one of the above points, although you did not try to advertise something prohibited. Sometimes in such situations, resubmitting for moderation helps, sometimes it is necessary to completely redo the ad. Be prepared for this.
Similarly, products from the “black list” are sometimes moderated. The same ad was rejected today, but may be accepted tomorrow.
Clause 4 – Advertising restrictions for certain goods and services
This paragraph refers to certain types of goods/services where additional restrictions apply.
The right to request documentation for a particular product/service at any time. Therefore, be prepared to provide one.
P.5 – Substitution of page content and VK advertising
Here we are talking about the very substitution of the site’s content. If you are suspected of this activity, then expect a ban. At best. At worst, you can be fined 100 thousand rubles.
Clause 6 – Agreement on the indication of advertising services of VK
P.7 – VKontakte links are prohibited
Clause 8 – Competing services, sites, trademarks and rules
Here we are talking about the fact that you cannot mention your competitors in one form or another. This is a good marketing technique, but the VKontakte administration does not welcome it.
P.9-10 – Reasons for rejecting an ad online
With points 9 and 10, everything is very clear. One reserves the right for the VK administration to reject advertisements if they contradict their views. The second extends current requirements and rules to advertising placed through mobile services.
Pros and cons of following VK rules
Bottom line
The current set of rules and requirements for advertising on VKontakte may seem too large and complicated for some. A bunch of points, a bunch of sub-points prohibiting this or that action. In reality, everything is much simpler. If you do not try to deceive anyone, then all your ads will pass moderation without any problems.
If you do not see any violations, but the ad was rejected, then try replacing some words or symbols in it (make any minimal changes) and send it for review again. It often works.
When starting to advertise on the Internet, you should carefully study the rules and restrictions in the advertising policy of each contextual and social network. In general, all restrictions and prohibitions are similar, since advertising systems operate in the same legal field. In addition, depending on the country or region, the prohibitions can be completely different.
What can't be advertised?
AdWords rules, Yandex.Direct rules, VKontakte rules , Facebook rules, give a clear idea of prohibited advertising topics. These include: fortune telling; tobacco products; products that promote the cult of violence and cruelty; drugs, psychotropic substances; goods subject to mandatory certification, without this certificate; goods prohibited in your country; gambling and weapons; pornography.
There are categories that can be advertised subject to certain conditions. These include: alcohol, lotteries, medicines and bioactive food additives, services for raising funds for the population, employment services.
- Using redirect links. The advertising system will reject such an ad. This is due to the fact that after moderation the final redirect link may change to another one.
- Advertising is misleading.
- Advertising of unattainable results, miraculous transformations, deception regarding the qualities of the product itself.
- Advertising copies of famous brands, replicas and fakes
- Advertising of sites that collect personal personal data, without specifying the reasons for such collection.
- Advertising products with low-quality or offensive messages. Such advertising can provoke a mass unsubscribe from advertising (clicking on the “Don’t show this advertising again” button - and this in turn will lead to punishment account from the advertising system.
How can they be punished for placing prohibited advertising?
There are several types of penalties for using prohibited methods in advertising or advertising prohibited products
- Ad blocking. The most harmless punishment from a search engine or social network.
- Domain blocking. In this case, all advertising for a specific domain will be deleted from existing advertising accounts, and newly created advertising with this domain will also be blocked.
- Account blocking. Complete removal user account.
- Financial punishment. The social network VKontakte may impose a fine of up to 100 thousand Russian rubles if the content of the page to which the ad leads is replaced.
Prohibition on advertising of brands sold by the store
Owners brands may be banned search engine run advertisements for stores or repair shops if the brand name appears in the headline. For example, it is impossible to find an advertisement for a store that states that it sells Nokia, TOEFL, or Xerox. Full list prohibited trademarks in public access does not exist.
Advertising with such keywords can only be placed with the official permission of the trademark owners. But at the same time, some contextual and social media allow the use of trademarks in keywords and do not respond to complaints if they arise.
One of the options to bypass this limitation is to use Cyrillic transliteration of trademarks or dynamic substitution keyword. However, there is a chance that such an ad will still end up being banned. However, here is an example of a Cyrillic replacement of the brand name (in the SERP headers):
From the article you will learn:
- what topics of advertisements are taboo on VK;
- a practical case on promoting a VKontakte website for the sale of gaming property;
- the price of traffic to the site from VK advertisements.
And is it worth launching campaigns on prohibited topics?
What are the topics of advertisements that are taboo on VKontakte?
“NO to low-grade advertising on VK!” – said the developers of the social network. And since December 2016, moderators have been paying special attention to the content of targeted advertising. The official administration community has published a list explaining what cannot be advertised VKontakte.
Taboo topics have complicated the promotion work of SMM specialists. But it is impossible to say that they made it impossible. Let's see how this happened in practice.
Case: Traffic to a site selling game property – World of Tanks
Task: attracting users to a site selling accounts, game gold, equipment for the online game “World of Tanks”.
The average price of property is 1200 rubles.
The price per click was set at 5 rubles, and per conversion – no more than 200 rubles.
What we did:
- Target audience analysis.
At the first stage, we analyzed the target audience and divided it into 2 segments:
- competing groups;
- interest groups.
Active group databases were manually collected for each segment.
- Launching ads with different targeting in order to identify the “leading ad” and run split testing for each segment separately.
Cost per click – 3.5 rub.
The following advertisements turned out to be effective for launching split testing:
Cost per click - 3 rubles.
- Running split tests with leading ads for each segment separately (competitor groups and interest groups).
After split testing, ineffective groups were eliminated, and from effective groups, a database of the most active users was collected using the TargetHunter service.
- Launching advertising campaigns in full force with different options teasers and advertising texts. Below is the analysis.
The average cost per click is 2.15 rubles.
Interest groups:
The average cost per click is 1.7 rubles.
Despite the fact that the topic for promotion on VKontakte is prohibited, we were able to launch ads in the following format:
And the promotional posts looked like this:
The average cost per visit to the site is 1.2 rubles.
In the end
As a result, promotional posts worked best. But the group that was specially created to launch them was quickly blocked. Again, because of the subject matter.
Total: the average cost per click was 1.7 rubles. (instead of the planned 5 rubles)
The client independently tracked conversions. According to him, the average cost per purchase is 100 - 150 rubles. (instead of the planned 200 rubles)
An advantage in this case will be increased awareness of the site (its products and services) among social network users, since there is a lot of competition in this segment of the market.
5 (100%) 1 voteDmitry Kovalev
The article will be useful to those who want to promote goods, services or communities using VKontakte public pages, but do not know where to start. After reading, you will learn how to select groups with your target audience and create posts that help achieve maximum conversion.
Audience identification
Before looking for communities, find out who yours is potential buyer and make his portrait.
Identify needs. Find out what need your product or service satisfies. It should be one thing that unites target audience. Surveys and forums will help you figure out what customers want.
Find out about interests. Find out about the interests of your audience to decide on the topic of the group.
The Cerebro Target audience search tool is suitable for this task. It allows you to analyze the interests of potential clients of the selected community.
In the “User Analysis” section, insert a link to the group in which you assume your target audience belongs.
“Cerebro” will well complement another tool located in the Facebook advertising account − Audience_insights. It shows the marital status, position, and top favorite sites of your audience members. And if you are studying the market in the USA, then in addition to the above, you will also have access to the salary level.
Determine gender and age. First, these parameters will help you choose groups with the right audience. Secondly, make the message in your post more personal. The service from Mail.Ru will help you find them out.
Selection of communities
After compiling an avatar of audience representatives, collect as large a list of pages as possible to which potential clients can subscribe. To do this:
- Use the Community Search on VKontakte.
- Find groups through " Market platform" V personal account.
- Use third-party tools to work with VK groups, such as “Publer”. To start the selection, go to the “Publics/Profiles” section, subsection - “VKontakte Publics”.
Community Analysis
When you have a decent list of groups on the same topic, check each of them according to five criteria.
Availability of target audience
To find out whether your potential clients are members of a community, check the gender, age and geography of its members. This data can be viewed in the “Statistics” tab.
Check the presence of an audience in the group by gender, age and geo
Participants' activity
If there are people of the right age and gender in the group, we check it for involvement. This indicator is abbreviated ER (engagement rate) and is calculated using the ratio of actions to coverage.
To understand whether ER is normal in a group, compare it with the indicators of leading communities in this topic.
Bots
You can find out the percentage of bots through the VKontakte application: “ Searching for “dead” members and subscribers" To do this, go to the application, paste the link to the community and click “Scan”.
The presence of bots is also shown by Pubbler.
Typically, groups have 10–20% bots. Anything more is a scam
Another way to check a community for “dead souls” is to look at the outflow of subscribers. To do this, look at the number of unsubscribes in the page statistics. A high jump in the graph of unsubscribers is a clear sign of a large number of bots.
Coverage
Reach indicates the number of views of a post in a news feed or on a community wall. When calculating this metric, only unique users are taken into account. Moreover, VKontakte does not count fast forwarding of an entry in the feed. A person must pay attention to the text or image. You can also see this indicator in the group statistics.
The normal reach rate is 10–20% of the total number of subscribers. If a million people subscribe to the group, the reach should be 100,000 - 200,000.
Advertising entries
If competitors placed only 1-3 times, their advertising most likely did not bring results. It’s worth checking her for professional suitability (read about this in the “Writing a post” block).
If competitors’ advertising posts are published regularly, most likely the group has the audience you need. And to get a share of it, distance yourself from competitors with the help of creatives and unique selling propositions.
Accommodation
Via administrator
To place directly:
- Find the administrator's contacts on the page. If they are not there, write your proposal in a message or in a sentence on the wall.
- Agree on the price, time and conditions of accommodation. By purchasing a package of accommodations at once, you can negotiate a discount. But you should only buy more than one advertising space at once in already verified communities.
- Choose the posting time based on subscriber activity. If the seats are only available for a period of low activity, ask the administrator to reduce the price a little. You can view the activity in Pubbler in the “Detailed Statistics” tab.
- Submit your post for approval. Please note that edits may need to be made. Therefore, it is better to send the recording in advance so as not to redo it five minutes before publication.
Through the VK exchange
Publishing through the VK advertising exchange is 10-15% more expensive. Suitable for those who do not use third-party tools to search for communities, since the service itself offers accommodation options. And also for those who do not connect third-party metrics to analyze advertising effectiveness, because in your personal account you can see detailed statistics after the campaign.
To post through the exchange:
- Create an ad and submit it for moderation.
When is the post will be tested, it will appear in the “Active” tab - you can place it. If it doesn’t work – “Rejected”. In this case, the moderators will definitely indicate the reason, after correcting which the ad can be sent back for moderation.
- Using the specified parameters, find groups for placement. You can search for them based on topic, budget, coverage, number of participants, etc. However, you won’t be able to find a specific community by name - the service itself will offer options.
- Submit a request for accommodation. Your ad will be automatically placed within the time range you specify.
Composing a post
After you have agreed on publication, prepare an advertising post.
- In your ad, take into account the audience’s needs and tell them how your product will solve their problem.
- Analyze competitors' advertising, if any. Then come up with a unique offer and post design to make your creatives stand out from the crowd.
- Study the content of the public in which you plan to post. Finding out which ones are the most popular will help you better understand your followers' interests. This will help make a more interesting and less promotional post.
- Fill the text with emoticons to make it more noticeable and focus attention on the main thing. Just don’t overdo it, the post should look natural, and the emoticons should be meaningful.
- Shorten long links in the text using vk.cc or Google URL Shortener. This way the recording will take up less space, look neater and, most importantly, inspire more confidence.
- The image should be catchy so that your post is noticed in the feed, but at the same time relevant to the offer.
- Write a catchy title. To do this, bring the main benefit to it. If it does not interest the target audience, then no one will read your text, even the most useful and selling one.
Working with comments
Negative. After publishing a post, people will leave comments under it, and not always positive ones. Therefore, try to work off all the negativity.
Informational. People can also ask questions: “how to order”, “how much does it cost”, “what is the advantage of the product”, etc. They also need to be answered in a timely manner.
By outsiders. Any off-topic comments can be asked to be deleted by the administrator.
Evaluation of results
To make it convenient to keep statistics and analyze the results, create a table in Google Sheets or Excel with the following fields:
- name and link to the community,
- advertising post,
- cost of accommodation,
- date and time of posting,
- administrator contacts,
- number of transitions,
- number of applications,
- ER groups,
- profit.
For data on transitions and applications, see Yandex.Metrica. And in order to distinguish your advertising records and the communities in which you are posted, add UTM tags to your links. Dmitry Dementy discussed this topic in more detail in the article: “”.
If you were placed through the VK exchange, in the advertiser’s personal account after the advertising campaign you will be able to see:
- the total number of users who viewed the advertisement and their distribution by gender and age;
- the number of unique users who followed at least one link in the post;
- number of users who shared, commented or liked the post;
- the number of subscribed users, if the community was advertised;
- number of applications per group.
To open detailed statistics, click on the corresponding icon in the section of the corresponding advertising campaign.
If you sent a request directly, but there is no way to connect the metric, ask the administrator for post statistics before deleting it. She shows:
- overall reach and subscriber reach;
- likes, reposts and comments;
- the number of users who have hidden a post from their news feed;
- number of complaints about the publication;
- the number of people who clicked on the link in the post.
Repeated placements
If your first few posts in the community are successful, continue posting. But keep in mind that the ad conversion rate will decrease over time. Most members will notice your ad after a few placements, so they will ignore it next time. To overcome banner blindness, update your post every few placements.
- Test new title.
- Change emoticons.
- Change the structure of the text.
- Post with a different image.
Give your post a new look and users will start noticing your post again.
For example, I posted several times in the community with the following announcement:
The first placement brought ten leads, the second - eight, after the third there were only two applications, after the fourth - three.
I changed the photo, came up with a new title, added different emoticons, and the next day I posted in the same group.
Repeated postings with a new post brought eight, and the second time - seven applications. Despite the fact that the text of the ad remained the same, only its visual part and the title changed.
Search for new communities
To increase your reach, you need to constantly look for new groups to post. In order to find similar communities, use a tool to find the intersection of audiences, for example, such as Cerebro Target. In it, you can follow a link to a public page in which you have already successfully advertised and find similar ones, which will contain some of the same subscribers. To do this, go to the “Search for audience” section, subsection “Groups with target audience” and paste the link to the desired page.
Groups can be filtered by the parameters you need and download links to them text document or in Excel.
To find audience overlaps, you can use and free analogues, for example, the application "
