Feed file. RSS, XML, Atom - What is it and how will it help me use the Web more effectively?

Hello everyone!

Yandex.Direct feeds are a real lifesaver for large online stores, allowing you to automate the creation of ads in Direct. How to do this is a matter of technology...

There are a huge number of online stores on the Internet with a large assortment that you need to drive traffic to in order to get sales. However, one pops up here big big problem— how to advertise such a number of product items in Yandex.Direct? Is it really necessary to select keywords for each product and write advertisements? No! It is enough to use what is below and.

A little history

Last year, 2016, Yandex released such interesting things as dynamic ads and feed management in the BETA version. They were created to work with sites containing information about a huge range of services or products. With these innovations, Yandex has made life much easier for owners of sites who would like to advertise in Direct.

What is a feed?

A feed is a file containing information about a product or service. Can be in several formats:

• YML (Yandex Market Language). Specially developed file format for Yandex.Market;
• And a couple more obscure ones - GZ and TSV;
• You can also use compressed ZIP files.

All these formats are used by Direct and Market to obtain information that is displayed in ads. Of all the above, the first two are most preferable.

What is the feed for?

As you already understand, feeds are needed to transmit information about the assortment of an online store, but how to use this information in Direct. Very simple! Use dynamic ads (k). However, it should be remembered that this type of advertisement serves exclusively as an addition to already running advertising campaigns, because it is still at the Beta testing stage.

How to create a feed?

For beginners launching advertising campaigns in the Yandex contextual advertising system, this issue is a big one, since there is no clear and understandable information on how to create a feed. So, in search of information for this lesson, I scoured a lot of sites, watched several videos, but didn’t find anything suitable, since apparently creating a feed is not something difficult for most webmasters.

I had to think a little with my head, but a bright thought immediately came to mind - if in Yandex.Direct you can use the YML (XML) file format, and Yandex.Market is a popular thing, then there is some kind of generator or template for such files. I was right and came across an XML sitemap generator that can generate YML - MySiteMapGenerator.

With its help, you can very easily create a file for both Yandex.Market and Direct:

When you open the generated YML file, you will see the following:

A set of code with all the data about the products whose pages were indexed by the YML generator. All this is called the Yandex.Direct feed, or rather Yandex.Market.

Other ways to create a feed:

1. Using special plugins for your CMS. For example, there is a Market Explorer plugin for CMS WordPress. If you have a different content management system, then look for it;
2. Using Excel, you can create a CSV file, but this option is less preferable than YML (XML).

What to do with the feed in Yandex.Direct?

After you have created a feed, you will need to upload it for verification in Yandex.Direct. You can do it like this:

Additional information about feeds can be found in Yandex Help, here is the link.

We kindly request: if you liked the material and helped in solving the problem, please share the link on social networks.

See you soon!

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   What is a feed?

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   What is the feed for?

GetDirect specialists tested a new XML feed from Yandex and shared the results.

Nowadays there are thousands and even tens of thousands of products in online stores. Run manually contextual advertising for the entire range of goods is theoretically possible, but it will take more than one month.

There is good news, some time ago Yandex made it possible to launch dynamic search campaigns using an XML feed.

Dynamic XML feed
An XML feed is a list of products indicating all the necessary categories: name, price, size, color and other indicators. The feed helps you launch contextual advertising for several thousand products in just one hour. Many have already heard about this tool, but not everyone understands what it is and how to use it. Let's talk.

Benefits of an XML feed:

• Ability to create and edit a large volume of advertisements.
• The ability to quickly edit a large volume of advertisements.
• The ability to automatically adjust advertisements depending on the presence or absence of certain goods in stock: display only relevant advertisements.
• Ability to filter ads by category, price, availability.
• Ability to add to feed additional characteristics products, which helps to flexibly generate ads.

Why the emergence of an ad generator based on an XML feed will have a positive impact on the contextual advertising market:

• The Yandex tool solves problems for which previously “you had to turn” to paid third-party services.
• When used correctly, the ad generator will allow you to create a large flow of targeted traffic.
• Saving working time is a definite plus.
• Painstaking collection semantic core has become an optional step when launching contextual advertising.

We apply it on a real project.
Using a case example, we explain what an XML feed is and how to work with it.

Creating dynamic ads requires standard settings that you would use for a search or YAN advertising campaign. The emphasis in the case is not on campaign settings, but on how, all other things being equal, you can increase conversion.

The case was made for a children's goods hypermarket. To add a feed to your account, you need to go to the “Feeds” section in your personal account.

The feed can be uploaded either from a computer by downloading the required Excel file, or you can provide a link to the feed on the Internet. The second option is the most preferable, as it will allow you to automatically update advertisements, synchronizing with the feed and excluding from display advertising for those products that are out of stock according to information from the feed.

After adding a feed, it must pass validation. Validation means checking the feed for correct syntax.

If everything is fine with the feed, the status “upload successful” will appear and the number of products in the feed will be indicated.

After this, you will be able to create a campaign with dynamic ads.

The essence of dynamic ads is this: Yandex, analyzing the contents of the feed, automatically generates relevant ads: this advertising format is most relevant for those stores whose product feed is very voluminous or whose product range changes frequently. Please note that a dynamic ad will not compete with a regular ad in search results. When choosing the most relevant ad to display, Yandex focuses on impressions and click statistics, cost per click and quality factor.

When creating an ad group, you must select the “Feed” data source and specify the directly loaded feed.

To further track the effectiveness of your advertising campaign, you should add parameters to the links. For example, in this form:

subid=dynamic-feed&subid1=kolyaski&subid2=(region_name)

To target specific product groups in your feed, you need to set a filter in the group settings.

In the Yandex.Direct report, you can see the search queries for which dynamic ads were displayed.

This report can be used as a starting point to collect relevant semantics for regular search and YAN campaigns. This approach to collecting the semantic core will require significantly less labor, but it is more likely to be more effective.

Tips for working with dynamic ads:

• You should not set higher bids than in regular search and YAN campaigns.
• You should always use adjustment bids to target audiences, time targeting, and regions. The minimum betting ratio is 50%, the maximum is 1200%.
• You should add clarifications to your ad templates.
• Always use the Product Categories and Price Range filters.
• For high-quality collection of the semantic core, additionally use reports on search queries.
• Don’t forget about the “Products in stock” filter: it is universal for many topics.

Dynamic Ad Limitations.
The list of topics available for advertising is limited:

• electronics and accessories;
• Appliances;
• industrial equipment;
• cloth;
• furniture;
• garden;
• sporting goods;
• Construction Materials;
• childen's goods;
• tires and wheels;
• cosmetics and perfumes;
• Property For Sale;
• sale of new cars;
• sale of used cars;
• sale of air tickets;
• hotels, inns.

Conclusion
Note that the described tool is still in open beta testing. It is likely that it will undergo a number of changes that will make it even more convenient and efficient. In particular, the expected expansion of available topics will significantly increase the number of users of the Yandex innovation. But now the dynamic ad block has proven itself to be an effective marketing tool.

Yandex.Feeds

The instructions consist of four steps:

Review and connection

Yandex feeds are feeds written in an XML-based language to send up-to-date information about the materials available on the site to the relevant sections of Yandex: “Real Estate” (YRL) and “Vacancies” (YVL).

The module allows you to generate feeds that can be sent to Yandex. As a result, the site receives additional traffic from cooperation with the Yandex.Work and Yandex.Real Estate sites. On these services, users view basic ad information and then go to your website to find out more details.

In addition, content transmitted through feeds will have beautiful view in search of:

To start using the Yandex.Feeds module, connect it to home page site control panels:

Module setup

Go to the “Yandex.Feeds” section and in the menu select the module that you are going to use to transfer materials to feeds:

Regardless of the selected module, you will need to make the following settings:

• Activate feed. Enables use of the feed for the selected module.
• Feed type— “Real estate” or “Vacancies”. Each type must use a separate module.
• Link, where the feed will be placed. This link must be used when validating the feed.
• All categories. The option allows you to use a separate category when generating a feed. This is necessary when not all module categories contain information about real estate or vacancies.
• Attribute/Material Field. According to Yandex documentation, there are a number of parameters that must be described in the feed. Material fields are used to describe them. In this section of the settings, you need to map the attribute and material field. Make sure the required information is added to the material field. Here you can add other information about the ad, use the area with the “+” image.

Yandex's technical requirements for feeds are described on this page.

After completing the settings, click on the “Save” button and check the feed at //example.com/module/feedya, where module is the address of the module that is connected for the feed, for example, news or blog.

Feed validation

Before publishing your feed, you must Necessarily pass validation. To do this, follow the link

In March, Yandex.Direct finished testing smart banners and made several additions to the format. Updated smart banners undergo moderation faster, you can add any field from the feed to the header, and creatives can now be viewed before saving. In addition, the format of new types of feeds, including the universal Yandex feed. Thanks to it, almost any business can launch smart banners.

Let's figure out how to create a campaign with smart banners using the Yandex universal feed.

What is a feed in Direct?

When creating smart banners or dynamic ads in Direct, you need to prepare a feed - a file that contains information about the product range. Based on it, the system generates an advertisement in accordance with user requests. The offer data set in the feed determines what information is shown in the ad to the user.

You can add the entire range of goods or services of the advertiser or a separate category that you want to promote to the feed.

Let's move on to creating a campaign in the Yandex.Direct interface.

Standard settings

Add a feed

You can create a feed during the campaign setup process or on the Manage Feeds page.

Yandex.Direct has several types of feeds that are suitable for different areas of business:

• retail - Yandex.Market feed, but also suitable for smart banners;
• hotels;
• cars;
• real estate;
• air tickets;
• other business.

The format of the document depends on the type of business, the set mandatory elements And technical requirements. You can save up to 20 feeds in Direct at the same time.

After choosing a topic, you need to upload the file in CSV format or provide a link to its location on the site. Following the link, the file must be accessible via HTTP, HTTPS or FTP. The feed size cannot exceed 512 MB.

The system can also automatically remove inappropriate UTM tags from links in the feed if you enable the appropriate option when loading.

You can download examples and templates for almost all types of feeds in the Yandex help center.

After downloading, the file will be sent for validation, which usually takes no more than a few hours. The system checks for the presence of required elements, their correct name and absence of repetitions.

When successful verification The feed status will be updated to “Upload successful”. Then you can select it from the list and add it to the campaign.

Setting up the “Other Business” feed

Using the Other Business feed type, you can upload any of the following:

• Yandex universal feed;
• AdWords “Special” feed;
• AdWords Travel feed.

All files must be in CSV format. The file can also be downloaded as an archive with a .zip or .gz extension. The first line should contain the names of the columns, the next line should contain data about the advertised offer. All data must be in UTF-8 encoding. Columns are separated by commas, so you should avoid them in your feed.

The universal Yandex feed for smart banners contains the following required elements:

• ID - unique identifier of a product or service;
• URL - link to the landing page;
• Image—link to the image for the banner.
• It is also recommended to add additional elements, which will make the ad more informative and attractive:
• Title - name of the product or service;
• Description - description;
• Price and Currency - price and currency;
• ID2 is the second identifier for stores with e-commerce connected to Metrica;
• Old price - price without discount or old price.

You can download the Yandex universal feed template in the Direct help.

Additional feed settings

After the feed has loaded and been validated, you can add URL parameters to the link, which will transfer data to the analytics system. To do this, select “Add parameters to links.”

And one more option: you can enable substitution of the title from the feed into the banner text by activating the “Substitute text from the feed as title” setting. Be sure to specify the feed element that should be included in the ad, for example Title.

Get creative

A smart banner is created using the creative designer.

The design of the ad depends on the type of business. Each topic presented has a specific layout and image format.

The new Preview feature lets you see if your feed elements are included in your ad correctly. To do this, select the desired one from the list of downloaded feeds.

The ad builder allows you to add your own background image, organization logo, call to action button and change their color.

Some layouts allow you to enable the "Special Offer" option. It makes it possible to add clickable text to the banner and use it to draw attention to promotions or discounts. To do this, you need to fill out the field with the text of the special offer, select color design and provide a link to the site page where it is located.

A feed can have many products, and offers can scroll in a carousel or mosaic format.

After saving the creative, you need to add it to the banner group for the campaign. There can be a maximum of 50 banners in one group.

Set up filters

After creating the banner, you need to set the settings for the ad group. Required condition for smart banners - setting up filters. Using a filter, the advertiser can specify which products from the feed will be shown to the selected audience.

First, determine the audience for the display:

• were interested in similar products online;
• looked at the products on my website;
• both groups.

A smart banner can display all or some of the products from your feed. To limit their number, write down the conditions for selecting goods.

For smart banners, you can set up to ten conditions and combine them with operators " AND " . One condition can have several ranges combined by the operator " OR " . Range selects products that fall within the specified interval.

In one campaign, you can create several groups of banners, divide them into categories and show users the offer that best matches their interests.

If you chose the “Click through rate optimization” or “Conversion rate optimization” strategy when creating your campaign, you will have to limit the CPC.

Fill in the remaining fields for the banner group: negative keywords, tags, and also check your time and geographic targeting settings again.

Finally

Smart banners - effective method advertising on networks that helps tell or remind the audience about an offer that interests them. Using a feed partially automates the creation of campaigns and allows you to make bulk changes to them. This helps professionals save time and control ad groups in their account.

Gadgets are not widgets

What are feeds? I often see "RSS", "XML", and "Atom" on many sites, but I don't know how to use these links.

- “Feeds” are a method of delivering information from websites, somewhat different from the usual browsing through a browser. Feeds allow you to subscribe to regular updates, which will be delivered through a specialized web portal, a reader program, and in some cases even through the good old Email. Feeds can also be packaged into "widgets", "gadgets" (" Gadgets are not widgets" - David Pogue), and other micro-objects that will allow you to quickly track the latest blog entries, new podcast episodes, as well as news, weather forecasts, and exchange rates from your favorite sites.

What does all of this mean?

You must have noticed the feed icon more than once, or such modified buttons (see right) on your favorite sites, blogs, podcast terminals. These icons represent content in any format - text, audio or video - you can subscribe to such a feed and read/watch/listen using a feed reader.

How is this convenient?

Advances in online publishing technology have made it possible to not only easily post regular updates to websites, but also to track changes across a large number of your favorite websites, blogs, without having to type each URL into your browser and check each site manually. Now you can significantly speed up your process of monitoring information from a large number of sites by subscribing to feeds and automatically collecting information in one place to view when necessary or convenient.

For the consumer of information: Subscribing to feeds makes it possible to view a huge number of online resources in the shortest possible period of time.

For the publisher of online information: Feeds provide immediate delivery of the latest information and the ability to subscribe to receive it automatically.

For advertisers: Advertising in feeds bypasses the shortcomings that appeared when using standard marketing channels - overload with spam, insufficient delivery speed, inconvenience associated with a clogged mailbox, etc. As a result, the advertising is thematic and not overwhelming.

Who publishes the feeds?

Today, almost all major web resources such as USATODAY.com, BBC News Headlines, ABCNews, CNET, Yahoo! , Amazon.com, as well as Russian-language news sites such as korrespondent.net, and many many others are using this new, effective method of delivering information. Google publishes feeds for many of its services, for example you can subscribe to various news items from Google News. In addition, hundreds of thousands of bloggers, podcasters, and vloggers publish feeds to stay closer to their readers, listeners, viewers, and commentators. Apple offers a variety of podcasts for download in its iTunes Store, all of which use feeds.

How will I read the feeds?

If you want to view and subscribe to feeds, you have many options to choose from. Today, there are more than 2,000 different feed reader apps, also known as aggregators (mainly for text content) and podcatchers (for tracking podcast updates). There are also reader programs designed exclusively for mobile devices.

Some of the aggregator programs will cost you little money, however, they will delight you with ease of use and will contain many pre-installed news channels, among which you will probably find some that are interesting for yourself. Free programs There are also a great many, try searching for the word “Feed reader” or “Feed aggregator” on popular search sites - you will get enough suggestions. Some popular feed aggregators will be listed at the end of this page.

A typical feed aggregator interface will display your news feeds and the number of new (unread) posts in each feed. You can group feeds into categories.

If you prefer online tools, you can easily find these. They will allow you to view the news feeds you subscribe to from anywhere you can find an Internet browser. Updates and new features are installed automatically.

How do I publish my own feed?

If you have a website, blog, audio/video materials, or just photographs, you can “attach” a news feed to your materials. If you use a popular blogging platform or publishing tool like TypePad, WordPress, or Blogger, then most likely news feed is created automatically for you. Even some other non-blog sites, such as the photo sharing network Flikr, provide feeds for the content you post to make it easier for your visitors to access that content. There are also tools that help convert traditional web content into a format suitable for RSS distribution.

The FeedBurner service allows web content publishers who already have a news feed (feed) to better understand the capabilities of this method of content delivery and improve interaction with their audience. If you already have a feed, run it through FeedBurner to get many new features and benefits.

Learn more about FeedBurner's services for blogs, podcasts, and business publishing.

And finally, some technical information

The new way to easily distribute content is often called "web feed", and technically this is implemented in the RSS format, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, and/or Rockdale, Sandow, and Southern (Railroad) if you believe in fairy tales at AcronymFinder.com. RSS is based on XML, a widely used standard for exchanging text information between applications on the Internet. RSS feeds can be read as a regular text file, but they are designed for computer-to-computer communication.

Note that RSS is only one format for describing XML feeds. Another, also quite well-known format is Atom. Both formats have their adherents, and it is unlikely that they will be combined into one format. However, most users are only interested in receiving fresh content, without particularly worrying about the shadow implementation of the service. FeedBurner helps publishers avoid the uncertainty of which format to use - it's all the same thanks to the SmartFeed service, which makes any format readable on any subscriber's device.