How to advertise prohibited topics on VKontakte: a real case. VKontakte advertising rules: if you go to the left, you’ll get into trouble... What you can’t advertise through the VKontakte advertising account

Advertising on VKontakte is one of the most common types of 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 about 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 meet 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 the norms of the Russian language. 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 clause, you will not be able to highlight words in the text through the use of capital letters (for example, DISCOUNTS) or through 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, of 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 advertisements, 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. Best case scenario. 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.

1. 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.
2. Advertising is misleading.
3. Advertising of unattainable results, miraculous transformations, deception regarding the qualities of the product itself.
4. Advertising of copies of famous brands, replicas and fakes
5. Advertising of sites that collect personal personal data, without specifying the reasons for such collection.
6. Advertising products with low-quality or offensive messages. Such advertising can provoke a mass unsubscribe from advertising (clicking on the “Don’t show this ad again” button) - and this in turn will lead to the account being punished by 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

1. Ad blocking. The most harmless punishment from a search engine or social network.
2. 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.
3. Account blocking. Complete deletion of the user account.
4. 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

Brand owners can prevent a search engine from running ads 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. There is no complete list of prohibited trademarks in the public domain.

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 networks allow the use of trademarks in keywords and do not respond to complaints if they appear.

One of the options to bypass this limitation is to use Cyrillic transliteration of trademarks or dynamic keyword substitution. 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 In contact with.

Taboo topics have complicated the promotion work of SMM specialists. But we cannot 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:

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. Launching advertising campaigns in full force with different options for 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.

Eventually

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 rub.)

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.

Advertising on VK is the most common among SMM specialists. People involved in promoting their own and other people's businesses have long realized that this is the best way to sell their goods and services. But, like everywhere else, there are rules that must be followed. If you do not do this, the publications will not be able to pass moderation. Now we will look at what rules exist for advertising on VKontakte, find out what is prohibited, and what penalties may follow.

Rules for advertising on VKontakte

There is a certain list of rules when placing advertising posts on VK that must be followed. Let's look at them in more detail.

Basic Rules

First of all, you need to take into account that the rules are updated regularly, you need to keep an eye on this. If you do not edit your publication so that it complies with the new rules, then it will not be able to pass moderation. You definitely need to read the set of rules of the VKontakte social network. If you post advertising content that violates them, the administration of the VK website will not post it. After that, read the advertising legislation. If even one point of this document is not met, you will be denied placement.

Next, you need to study the technical requirements for advertising posts. Choose the image and text format that suits you. Pictures must be large and high quality. We need a unique format to promote the group and applications (the image must be square). The picture or photograph should not be larger than 5 MB. Also consider which formats are supported: JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF or GIF.

Advertising design

If you decide to create an ad, keep in mind that the text in it must be written only in Russian. It is also imperative that punctuation be observed. It is prohibited to use obscene language in the text. You cannot write about events that can cause negative emotions in a person. For example: about death, murders, funerals, disasters. An advertiser may not include personal data in an ad: telephone numbers, address information. It is also prohibited to conduct a comparative analysis of your products with those of competitors in text or photos.

You cannot directly state: “Products for 18 year olds” or “Alexander – this service is only for you.” These are considered to be characteristics of the users' personality. Also keep in mind that pictures cannot be of low quality, only high quality is suitable. Their subject matter cannot be sexually oriented or scary. You cannot advertise alcohol, smoking, or drugs. All this applies not only to pictures, but also to videos.

What is prohibited from promoting on VK

Be sure to remember what exactly you cannot promote on the VKontakte social network:

• Services for collecting personal data, if there is no explanation for the reason for such actions.
• You cannot engage in activities to increase likes, subscribers, votes, using special services.
• You cannot advertise pornographic materials or trainings that teach how to seduce the opposite sex.
• Promotion of various smoking mixtures, as well as substances that are psychotropic, is prohibited.
• The administration does not allow advertising of alcohol and tobacco.
• Provision of abortion services by medical institutions or private individuals.
• Steroid drugs for muscle growth.
• Weapons and military equipment.
• Gambling.
• Applications or resources that provoke users to commit illegal actions.
• Materials of a political nature.

These requirements of the VKontakte administration are mandatory. Everything listed on this list is prohibited from promotion.

Where to read a clear set of rules

So that you can familiarize yourself with all the important rules, you need to click on the tab called “Advertising” in the “VK” menu item, and then press the “Rules” button. Next you will see a list that clearly outlines the rules. For successful promotion, you should definitely adhere to them; do not be alarmed that there are a large number of them.

Penalties for placing prohibited advertising

If you use prohibited methods of advertising on VK, the site administration may impose the following sanctions:

• Blocking your ad. This type of punishment can be called the most harmless of all.
• Your domain will be blocked. This means that all advertising materials from the domain on which the “Advertising Account” is located will be deleted. Even advertising that is newly created with this domain will be blocked.
• Your account will be blocked. Your account will be completely deleted.
• Financial sanctions. If the “VK” page where the publication leads is replaced, then the resource administration may fine you in the amount of 100 thousand rubles.

As you can understand, nothing good will come of it if you violate the rules of the VKontakte community.

Pros and cons of following the rules of "VK"

If you do not violate the rules of the VK community, then the publics you create will never be blocked. Plus, over time, moderators will begin to check your advertisements much faster. You will be able to work normally and earn money. Also, no one will impose penalties on you. There are absolutely no downsides to following the VKontakte rules.

Peculiarities

Despite the fact that it is prohibited to advertise medical services or products, if you attach the disclaimer “There are contraindications. “You need to consult a doctor,” the administration may miss your advertisement. It is also worth knowing that representatives of the VK administration have the right to request from you a document for a specific product or service. You need to remember this so that problems do not arise. You must understand that any publication you send for moderation is checked not by robots, but by people. Therefore, take the human factor into account.

Let us immediately note that there is no universal solution on how to advertise a group on VK. A good result can only be achieved through systematic, systematic and high-quality work.

Basics

Before moving on to advertising the VKontakte group, let’s establish the basic truths about the creation of the groups themselves. First of all, you need to be sure that the chosen topic/idea of ​​the project is truly relevant and interesting. There is a pattern: the more interesting the topic, the faster the group’s audience grows.

Most likely, there are already groups on the Internet whose concept is similar to yours. Your task: refine the idea, make it wider/narrower, look from the other side, add zest and bells and whistles that your competitors don’t have. The group should help users solve their problem (having an interesting pastime, obtaining information about a product/service, communicating with like-minded people, etc.).

We've decided on the profile, now we're choosing a name. There are 2 options: positioning by service/product and by activity. That is, the name should reflect the main area of ​​activity: “Window installation in Moscow”, “Laptop repair in St. Petersburg”, “Wedding limousines in Tomsk”. If there is a ready-made recognizable brand with an impressive number of clients, we simply call the group the same as the company.

Please note that the social network VKontakte is well indexed by search engines, provided that the name is correctly composed. That is, if you make a name in accordance with the most relevant search queries, this will ensure an impressive influx of search users. To create an attractive name, the Yandex tool Wordstat will help.

And last on our list, but far from least important, is content. 3 criteria for quality content: relevance, uniqueness, virality. After reading the material, you should have a desire to repost. If the user finds the information useful, he shares it on his page and it becomes visible to his friends, which provides an additional influx of subscribers to the group. The number of reposts and likes are the best indicators of content quality. If there are few of them, it is necessary to change the direction and/or topic.

How to advertise a group in contact: effective ways

As you know, Russian people are terrible at improvisation; various limits and restrictions are a challenge for us. Therefore, there is a workaround for this mechanism: we buy fake pages and add people as friends who meet the criteria of the target audience (TA) of the group. Next, we send them an invitation to join the group. In this case, the user receives an invitation from a friend, which increases the level of trust.

It is logical that, due to the existing limitation, you will need not just 1-2 pages, but dozens and even hundreds. Services and programs will help with this, for example, SmmLaba. Price: 350 rubles for the purchase of pages (50 pieces for 7 rubles) + 1500 rubles for the purchase of a proxy for each fake (50 pieces for 30 rubles) + 700 rubles/month for the software.

Targeted advertising. These are those annoying messages that appear on the side and in the news feed. Understanding the intricacies of targeted advertising is an independent science. Let us describe only the essence of this advertising for VK public pages: advertising posts and offers are displayed only to the target audience, which you can specify by gender, age, interests, and place of residence. Looking for young mothers aged 25 to 30 living in the Moscow region? The system itself will find them and show you your offer, which they cannot refuse. The Getuniq service will be useful for setting up targeted advertising yourself.

1. Advertising a VKontakte public page through posts in other public pages. This method is as old as the social network itself. The principle is indecently simple: you purchase posts in popular groups and communities, from where the user can follow a link to your site. An advertising post is posted for a certain time; the time of publication and removal is agreed upon in advance. The most commonly used scheme is 1/23: the post stays in first place for an hour, and then spends 23 hours in the feed and gradually drops as other posts are published. Special services can facilitate the process of selecting a “promoted” group, monitoring publication time and payment; we will talk about them below. You can negotiate directly with administrators. The cost of the post will be 10-20% lower, but there are practically no guarantees.
2. Inviting. This method is suitable for promoting a specific meeting/event. You create an event, designate the beginning and end, provide an organizer and invite guests. The difference from the first method is that invitations are sent out by other groups in which your target audience is located. Scrolling through the community feed with jokes, you probably saw invitations to webinars, master classes or trainings. This is inviting in its purest form.
3. Competitions. Today there is no more effective way to advertise a group on VK than to hold competitions. In order to take part in the competition, the user must perform an action useful for your group - repost, comment, subscribe, and so on. Where to post posts about the fact that you are holding a competition if the advertised group does not have many subscribers yet? Communities like “Competitions (name of city), “Freebies in “name of city”,” “Promotions (name of city)” will come to the rescue; they have already generated an audience ready to perform certain actions.
4. Mutual PR. That is, you promote the post of another group/organization, and they post your post. There are a number of nuances here: the number of subscribers should be approximately the same, the content and topics should be similar, the owner/administrator should be adequate so that they can accept the offer and not throw out surprises.
5. Expert opinions. This is a promotional post with a link to the group, commissioned from a celebrity/blogger/expert. For example, through a group you sell sportswear. You can order a post from a famous person that he chooses your online store for sports.

Texts for advertising a group on VK: standard templates

The most common is direct advertising. Posts like this drive home the proposal head-on. The effectiveness of the message in this case directly depends on the art, talent and level of professionalism of the copywriter. There is only one rule here: the text should be as selling as possible and minimal in size.

Direct advertising is effective both for increasing the group’s audience and for sales. You need to list the advantages of the product/service, convince the subscriber of the need to purchase, interest and attract them to the group/website, etc.

An example of an advertisement for a group on VK: “The object of desire for fashionistas from all over the world at a bargain price! UGG boots from UGG for only 4,000 rubles! Group subscribers receive an additional 10% discount. Hurry! The promotion is valid for a limited time: from May 1 to June 1, 2018.” An advertising post provides room for imagination, don’t be afraid to experiment.

If you are trying to increase the number of subscribers, your post should describe the benefits of joining the group. The group must be clearly positioned according to interests, then people will join more willingly.

For example: “Developing Logic” - these are new logic problems every day, these are lively debates and discussions, these are effective methods and techniques for developing intelligence, these are interviews with experts in the field and much more.”

The second type of post is a post with a cliff. The point is that you post interesting text, or rather the beginning of it. And to read the continuation, the user must follow the link to the group.

The full version of the text is displayed in a group, above the wall, so that every visitor sees it first. If you don’t pin the text, you won’t be able to avoid a sea of ​​negative reviews and comments, and it won’t add more subscribers. When used correctly, a “torn” post can gain thousands of new subscribers. According to statistics, if the content is really interesting + the post is posted in a high-quality thematic community (with a real, not fake audience), every fifth visitor will remain in the group and subscribe.

And the last type is a wiki post. These are thoughtful, informative posts, formatted as Wikipedia articles. The better and more relevant the material provided in the Vivic post, the more users will join the group. For highly specialized professional groups, this is just the thing.

How to set up advertising on VK for a group

Specialized services will help with this:

1. http://oliveaclub.ru/. Here you can keep track of advertising campaigns and manage them, monitor the number of new subscribers from advertising, the number of clicks from a post, etc.
2. http://allsocial.ru/. The service itself searches for optimal communities for posting advertising posts and monitors group statistics.
3. http://borgi.ru/. It also looks for groups to place advertisements, analyzes competing groups, and monitors trends in partner programs.

Let's take a closer look at how to set up targeting. First of all, open the VK market platform and create a profile here. To create an ad, open the “Targeting” section and select its type: “Community”, enter the name of our group, as shown in the figure: Finally, we determine how we will pay for advertising: for clicks or for impressions. And click “create ad”. That's it, targeting has started.

Advertising a group on VK: the cost you will have to pay

We figured out how to advertise a VKontakte group. Now let's talk about how much it will cost. Again, there is no universal figure or pricing scale. The cost of a group's advertising campaign can be up to 1,000 -2,000 rubles, and may exceed 20,000 rubles. The most important thing is to actually start doing something.

If you attract 10,000 subscribers, then it will be much easier, since the mechanism has already been launched. Bring your audience to 20 thousand, then 30 thousand, 40 thousand. And don’t slow down, continue promotion, the cost will be lower and the effect will be greater. But you already need to come up with original posts and unique offers, something new and original.

Let's look at the approximate prices of the main types of advertising:

1. The price of targeted advertising depends on the clickability of the ad being served and the competition for the specified target audience. On average, 1 click in Moscow and St. Petersburg costs 25-30 rubles, 1 click costs 5 rubles. An adult subscriber costs from 10 rubles. In the Russian Federation and from 25 rubles. in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
2. An advertising post in the community costs between 500-3500 rubles/day, depending on the audience.
3. The price of an expert opinion post is as agreed, even barter for a product/service is possible.

So, how to advertise a VK group? The answer is simple: in different ways. Try all methods, conduct analytics and track which method gave results and what you need to abandon. Only an integrated approach and comprehensive coverage will yield results.

Thank you subscribers and creative inspiration!