Direct Commander is a separate program with a user-friendly interface from Yandex, which is designed to work effectively with a large number of advertising campaigns. It greatly simplifies their editing, as it allows you to make the same type of edits to any number of ads. Direct commander optimizes work, allowing you to make changes to campaigns and ads as quickly as possible.
Benefits of using Direct Commander:
- the application runs on a local computer, so you can first make all the changes and then upload them to the advertising campaign;
- you can work in Direct Commander even with an unstable Internet, without fear of losing important changes;
- it is possible to load ads and phrases from files in the form of a table;
- you can quickly find any phrase or ad, as well as expand the list of keywords, thanks to the built-in selection tool;
- in Yandex Direct Commander, you can set bids for many phrases at once, as well as massively replace text and links in several ads.
How to start using Direct Commander?
To start using this service, you need to go to your Yandex Direct personal account, there in the left menu, through the link tools, you need to select «Commander» from the drop-down list and click on it. Download Direct Commander and install it, follow the prompts, register and enter the program.
The main interface of Direct Commander is divided into three parts:
- on the left side of the panel, the main work with campaigns takes place;
- the right panel is used to work with groups, ads, phrases;
- the rightmost panel — the inspector was created in order to edit the data.
When learning how to work in Direct Commander, you should definitely pay attention to the «Get» button, which allows you to download data from the advertising account, and «Send», with which you can upload changed data to Yandex Direct.
Editing tools
The Yandex Direct Commander program has wide functionality in the left panel, namely the commands:
- export, which allows you to upload an advertising campaign to a file with the XLSX or CSV extension;
- add, thanks to which you can create new groups, companies and more;
- from the buffer, data is loaded from the operating system, copying the data in any program;
- import loads data from a file on the computer;
- replace will allow you to find and replace specific data.
Inspector panel in Direct Commander
This area of the program is designed for convenient changes to all data for selected ads or groups. It has the following blocks in Direct Commander:
- Contacts: Edit and add information about the organization or business card.
- Announcement: Filling in the title, optional title, text, and state.
- Images: add or remove photos or videos that can be uploaded via Yandex Direct Commander.
- Add-ons: editing a business card, prices and clarifications, as well as specifying quick links, a description of a service or product.
- Information: placement of basic data, which includes the campaign number, groups, ad type.
Direct commander features
Search and Replace
When adjusting ads, there are often problems with their content. If you need to make a large number of amendments to the URL, for example, due to the “relocation” of the site pages, change the text, images in ads, or add new extensions, then you should use the Search and Replace functionality of Direct Commander.
To work effectively with texts, you can use special service symbols in Direct Commander:
- «?» represents any character and if you enter «company», the program will find and replace all words containing «company» or «campaign»;
- «*» denotes any number of different characters, for example: «K * ya» in the search can mean «kitchen», «company», «king» and so on, and if you use this character at the beginning or end of the line, it will mean a fragment that begins or ends in any way.
Mass changes in Direct Commander
You have the following options for making a mass change:
- if the block is repeated in ads, then you can edit it in all selected ads at once;
- if the blocks in which something needs to be corrected are different, then ads can be edited in small groups or one at a time, you can see their content in the Inspector panel of Yandex Direct Commander;
- if the changes were made incorrectly, the unload icon will show the corresponding error, so you should not immediately deselect the selected objects: you may have to edit them again.
Working in Direct Commander
Creating a campaign from scratch
In order to create a new campaign in Direct commander, you need to go to the «Campaigns» tab and click the create button, then select the desired type. A campaign called «New Campaign» will appear and, if it is selected, the necessary settings fields will be displayed in the inspector. The added ad groups will appear in the Groups tab. When you click on it in the Yandex Direct Commander inspector, a window with the necessary settings will open.
In the «Groups» tab, you need to decide on the type of ad you are creating and fill in all the settings, including keywords, interest conditions, and retargeting. To quickly and massively edit an existing campaign, you need to use all the tools described above. The functionality and interface of Direct Commander is intuitive, so adjusting individual ads or entire advertising campaigns is quite easy. You can make changes to any campaign except those in the archive.
The campaign is ready. What’s next?
Changes will take effect when editing an old or creating a new campaign only after it is sent to the Yandex Direct server along with bids and parameters. Individual ad groups cannot be submitted.
Algorithm for sending a campaign from Direct Commander to Yandex Direct:
- you need to check all the settings and correct all the errors indicated by the system, then select the campaigns that are ready to be sent;
- send data by one of the options: all data at once, only bids (for keywords, except for new phrases that have never been sent yet) or only campaign parameters;
- if there are drafts, Direct Commander will offer to send them for moderation.
Additional features of Direct Commander
- Phrase selection. This tool is able to expand the semantics and help in the search for negative keywords. On the «Phrases» tab in the «Select phrases» option, you can select several queries at once.
- Keyword optimization. With its help, cross-minus is performed in Yandex Direct Commander, which adds additional negative keywords to the keys to exclude intersections between them, and gluing duplicates, which involves combining phrases that differ only in negative keywords.
- Import and export. If you have ready-made ads in any tabular format, you can create an advertising campaign using this data. You need to click on import from a file and check if the data is recognized correctly.
- Bet Master. This functionality of Direct Commander should be used if you need to set bids for a large number of key phrases. In the «Phrases» tab, you need to select this option and set rates: a single rate for search and networks, on search — depending on the desired amount of traffic, or only in networks, if you need to take into account audience coverage.
Errors in Yandex Direct Commander
Errors with campaign parameters
When an error is detected, Direct Commander shows a «Stop» sign next to the campaign. You can find out the cause of the problem by hovering over the icon that appears. The occurrence of such errors may be due to:
- incorrect values or missing required parameters in the campaign settings;
- groups of ads included in a campaign when working with Direct Commander.
Child objects contain errors
This type of error often occurs due to problems within an advertising campaign, namely in phrases or ads. To search for an error, you must go to the appropriate group. Direct commander shows what the inaccuracy of the child object is. Most often this is due to the incorrect use of special characters.
Maximum number of groups exceeded
The limit of the maximum number of groups that can be in a campaign is 1000. If it is exceeded, you need to cut out the excess part and transfer it to another campaign. To do this, in Direct Commander, you can copy the previous work with all the settings and remove unnecessary groups from it.
Conclusion
Direct Commander is a convenient program with great functionality that can optimize the management of advertising campaigns and ads. It has a clear interface, allows you to work efficiently with a large amount of data and makes it possible to upload files of different formats. The use of Yandex Direct Commander is possible both when creating new advertising campaigns and when mass changing parameters in current projects. If you want to achieve a high-quality result when setting up Yandex Direct advertising, then contact the experienced specialists of the Optima-Promo™ IT company.