There are places people go on business, and places where they simply live. Search is business: you arrive with a question, get an answer, leave. A messenger is the evening — chats, channels, a feed; people go there not to buy but to pass the time. Advertising long ago learned to reach the first and barely knew how to reach the second. That’s changing now, and changing in the most mundane way — through an ad account many people already have open.
Yandex made it possible to launch ad posts in Max and Telegram straight from Direct. Buying ads in channels used to be a separate saga: find the admins, negotiate by hand, pay for something vague, and measure it by eye. Now it’s an ordinary format in a familiar account, with automatic channel selection by topic and geography and proper analytics. The barrier to entry dropped — and people who never considered it will now walk in.
How it differs from an ordinary ad
A search ad catches ready demand: the person is already looking, you slip into their hand. A post in a channel works earlier — when there’s no demand yet, but there is attention. It’s closer to what used to be called display advertising, only with targeting precision and pay-for-result instead of pay-for-impressions.
And the person’s mood is different. In search they’re on a task and in a hurry. In a channel they’re relaxed and reading. So the message has to be different too: not «order now at a discount», but a story, something useful, a reason to get interested. Same product — different tone.
Who genuinely needs it
Not everyone, and it’s fair to say so. The format is good where demand is impulsive or deferred and the product is visual and emotional. A coffee shop, a barbershop, courses, delivery, a local service, an info-product — anything where «tell me more» works better than «buy». There a post in the feed introduces you and warms the lead up.
But you can’t move urgent demand into a channel. Someone whose car just died or who’s locked out of their flat has no business in an evening feed — they’re in search, and that’s where you catch them. Dragging that kind of service into a messenger by force is burning budget.
What not to do
First — don’t move a search ad into a channel word for word. In a feed it’s dead: the format wants a living post, not a squeeze of selling points with a phone number at the end. Second — don’t measure it by the last click. A messenger is more about the introduction than the immediate sale. If you look only at same-day direct requests, you’ll underrate the channel and switch off exactly the thing that was quietly warming demand.
Where to start
Cheaply. Take one clear offer, build a human post around it, launch it on a narrow topic and geography, watch for a week. But look not only at clicks — also at whether branded searches and direct visits to the site went up. This is a new channel of attention, and attention doesn’t convert right away.
We set this up as part of your contextual advertising, not as a separate stunt: search catches the hot leads, messenger posts warm the lukewarm ones, and both run from one account with shared analytics. That way you see not just «how many clicked» but how one channel feeds the other. If your ads are already running, messengers are a logical next arm — not a replacement for what already works.