Ukraine is in a state of war that affects all spheres of life, including the economy and digital technologies. Despite the challenges, Ukrainians demonstrate remarkable resilience and ability to adapt to new conditions. This is also reflected in digital habits and trends, which are actively developing even in times of crisis.

The Ukrainian digital market demonstrates significant potential and opens up new opportunities for advertising and business. Every year, newage. agency researches the Ukrainian digital landscape, and here we will provide interesting figures on the state of our own domestic market, as well as share insights on advertising tools that will be useful for all digital marketers.

Number of population and digital consumers

The first thing to understand about any market is its size, the number of potential consumers. We are no longer seeing such a significant outflow of population as we did in 2022-23, but the population continues to decline during the war. Currently, Ukraine has 30.4 million people, of whom 17.9 million are Internet users and potential online advertising audiences. 

We emphasize that this number does not include children, and we have deliberately excluded online users of online businesses from the sample (this does not include children and people over 70). The illustration below also shows the gender and age distribution of users.

We calculated this figure based on historical data from the State Statistics Service (which currently does not publish demographic reports). We also used public information on the number of internally displaced persons, data on Ukrainian refugees registered by the UN, as well as information from advertising systems about the potential reach of the adult audience

Number of Ukrainians in other countries

Since 2022, millions of Ukrainians have moved abroad. Most of them are children, but the number of adults and potentially economically active Ukrainians abroad can also be judged by data on digital activity.

Thus, according to our data, the number of Ukrainian refugees continues to grow, but at a much slower pace than in 2022-23. As of May 2024, there were 4.2 million Ukrainian Internet users abroad (excluding children).

In previous years, the largest number of our refugees were based in Poland, but in 2024, Germany became the leader in safe haven. The rest of the leading countries are listed on the slide below.

As far as we can tell from surveys and external research, these people are gradually integrating into the communities in which they find themselves. For example, according to the Center for Economic Strategy, in May 2023, most refugees (65%) claimed that they felt better in Ukraine than in a foreign country. However, already in January 2024, 61% claimed that the country of asylum was better than it was at home. No matter how painful it is to read such data, we are grateful to all the nations and governments that have sheltered our people. 

When it comes to the reasons that might motivate people to return home, it is mostly about the factors surrounding the war: the end of the war, the cessation of hostilities in the respondent’s home region, or the cessation of russian bombing of Ukrainian cities.

Of course, people do not forget about social factors: rising living standards and rising salaries are also important factors. At the same time, the termination of support in the country of asylum is the least influential factor in the decision to return. 

“Brands should not forget that there are Ukrainians abroad who did not leave of their own free will or because of a good life. And you should communicate with them, build relationships and brand knowledge in order to interact with them either now or in the future.” — says Oleksandr Rolsky, CEO of newage. 

It should be noted that we, for our part, are working on all the points that are important for refugees. Yes, the IMF’s economic forecast for Ukraine is relatively positive. After the shock of 2022, we are seeing a decrease in unemployment, an increase in wages, and a decrease in inflation. The year 2024 is much better than the previous two in terms of key macroeconomic indicators; it is even catching up with the “pre-war” year 2021 in some places.

Digital habits of the Ukrainian audience

The trend we have been noting since 2022, and which continues to this day, is interest in news. In the 2022 research, we observed a surge in traffic to news sites, and in 2023 we cited a study that showed that 98% of Ukrainians read news every day. The USAID survey shows that interest in news remains high among the Ukrainian audience, and researchers call social media (which includes the Telegram messenger) the main source of news. But traditional media also retain influence over certain audiences.

Social networks are more popular among Ukrainians aged 18-35, while Ukrainians over 46 make up the majority of the TV, radio, and press audience,” the USAID authors summarize.

In general, Ukrainians are very involved in the digital world. According to colleagues from Kantar, each Ukrainian has 3.8 devices for accessing the Internet: smartphones, computers, tablets, SmartTVs, and other devices.  Among them, the absolute favorite and the window to the digital world is the smartphone – Ukrainians spend an average of 6 hours on it online. 

We spend 11.4 hours a day on all these devices. The graphs below show the breakdown by device, and the dynamics of usage in different years.

A significant share of online time is spent watching videos. Ukrainians spend 2.5 hours a day watching videos on YouTube and another 1.6 hours watching other streaming videos (movies, TV content, etc.). 

And such online activity attracts advertisers. Ukraine’s advertising market is recovering, local and international brands are adapting to the conditions we are in and continue to do business and create advertising campaigns.

Digital has become an absolute favorite in terms of investment. For the third year in a row, the volume of investments in digital advertising has exceeded the volume of investments in offline advertising.

Among the many advantages of digital over offline promotion, we believe the key is its adaptability. An advertising campaign can be easily ” screwed” or vice versa, depending on the circumstances, which is not offered by radio advertising, TV formats, and even more so by OOH (Out Of Home) advertising,” consider newage.

 We will talk about this in more detail later, where we will describe the main advertising formats and the cost of their use over the past year for YouTube (as a media platform), as well as Google Ads, Display & Video 360, Facebook, Instagram.

Advertising tools

We have thoroughly researched advertising tools and how they work in the Ukrainian market and found a number of insights that can be useful for marketers around the world. So, we’ll leave the full version with Ukrainian prices and audience sizes in the original study (you can share it with your Ukrainian colleagues), but here we’ll look at the top insights.

Google advertising formats and platforms in 2024

Google’s ecosystem covers almost all Internet users in Ukraine, but in terms of advertising tools, it does so in a complicated and branched way. The audiences of the tools mostly overlap, but each has its own unique users who use only one service available for advertising. Let’s look at this in a Venn diagram.

If we use Display & Video 360, it has all the same audiences as Google Ads, plus 2.9 million exclusive placement audiences. Taking into account all the audience intersections, we get a total DV360 reach of 17.8 million users.

So, out of 17.9 million users in Ukraine, Google’s tools can reach almost everyone. Let’s take a closer look at how specific solutions for interacting with this audience work.

YouTube

YouTube is primarily a platform for media promotion, so let’s first look at the main media formats it offers: Bumper, In-stream, and Non-Skip.

A bumper is a six-second video that cannot be skipped. There is a fairly large inventory here, coinciding with the potential reach of the platform. For certain niches (for example, alcohol), the coverage may differ and, accordingly, the price will increase.

In-stream is a video of 6 seconds or more, with a pay-per-view. It is characterized by a higher viewership than a video with a purchase per 1000 impressions. On average, 43% of ads are watched. The ads are mostly shown on mobile devices, and there is more inventory than on the bumper.

Non-Skip are videos of up to 20 seconds that cannot be skipped. The price is the highest compared to the others, but we’ll talk about that separately later. It was common for clients to use this format with a larger share on SmartTVs to reduce the cost of contact. As this format allows you to convey a message without focusing on high conversion to clicks.

Price dependence on coverage

The graph shows the price dynamics for the period from January 2023 to May 2024. The dotted line indicates the maximum and minimum prices for our campaigns, and the red line in the middle is the weighted average price; the figures are recorded in the legend of each slide.

We can see that the price is quite sensitive to seasonality, and during the peak periods of Black Friday and New Year’s Eve, the price increases significantly – this should be taken into account when estimating budgets.

It is also important that the market is growing and we see a trend of price increases in general; it is gradual, but it is there. It is gradually increasing on average.

Separately, we have highlighted reserve campaigns on the In-Stream graph. You can reserve a certain amount of money in advance, and the system will offer you how many impressions it can guarantee for this money and at what price you will buy. That is, you fix a price for yourself, regardless of the auction.

On average, reserve prices are higher, but it’s important to note that this can be beneficial during the high season; for example, on Black Friday, advertisers received lower prices for reservations than they would have had in an auction because they fixed their prices in advance and booked their impressions.

Does the volume of advertising affect its cost?

While researching the campaigns, we noticed the dependence of costs on price. With each subsequent investment in advertising, the cost increases. Let’s look at the graph of this ratio for Bumper. Costs go up – the more up, the more costs. The more to the right, the higher the price. At the intersection of costs and price is the point that was received in fact.

On average, every 10% increase in the budget yields 3 to 7% increase in CPM. These are the percentages we showed for bumper ads. Other formats gave similar results, so you can use this formula when estimating your budgets,” says Dmytro Konovalenko, Head of Media Planning & Strategy at newage.

We emphasize that this difference depends on the scale of the campaign, and an additional investment of UAH 10,000 will affect the costs much less than a further investment of UAH 5 million.

Additional formats on YouTube

Video action is a combination of in-feed and in-stream video, and advertisers use it mostly for conversion and performance channels. The price depends on the conversion you set for its optimization: the lower down the funnel you move, the higher the price at the end.

Shorts is a relatively new format, Google is promoting it heavily, and there are changes with this format. Currently, 10 million users in Ukraine have access to it. The viewership of short videos is up to 20%, and for long videos, it is up to 5%.

Audio. Not all videos and formats are displayed, but when the system realizes that you are watching a video without engagement. If the user did not switch the video and it started automatically; if they do not move the mouse or contact the phone; if the system understands this, it will try to show the audio format, not in-stream or other formats.

You need to adapt your creatives for all these formats. For Video Action, you need a high-quality video cover, because the video is mostly shown in feeds and the cover is important. For Shorts, you need a native and trendy video that will fly well among other content; and for audio, you need voiceover.

Don’t be afraid to use Shorts. This format has its own specifics, but its cost is at the level of banner advertising. So, if you have a good creative with a message from the first seconds, it should work well,” recommends Oleksandr Rolsky, CEO of newage.

Banners in Google Ads

Google Banner Ads are the main media format that is not displayed on YouTube. They are used to increase brand awareness, but also to drive traffic and generate leads. We use banners in 40% of our campaigns.

Let’s start with banner ads, which are purchased on a CPC basis and are used to drive traffic. When analyzing, we found that the price depends more on the targeting we set up than on the creative (although it does). This is important to consider when planning.

Another interesting indicator is viewability, which actually indicates the quality of advertising contacts. Viewability for a banner is when the user sees more than 50% of the banner on the screen for 1 second. Read more in the article “What is viewability and how to use it for effective advertising“.

We have also analyzed the cost of banner ads focused on reach with CPM payments.

Despite the advantages of traffic-generating campaigns, you need to supplement your strategy with banner campaigns for reach, if appropriate. This is also true for video campaigns. Viewability is higher here, and the video display is cheaper. And when we used it separately, despite the “reach” goal, we received 15-20% lower CPA compared to the traffic banner.

So, the main conclusion is to combine your models, strategies, and divide banners into different purposes. It is important to use post-view analysis when using banners. Because banners do not give such a CTR and post-click conversions; you will not see them in campaign analytics if you look at clicks. That’s why it’s important to compare it by post-view.

Display & Video 360

Display & Video 360 is a tool of the GMP platform that can be used to place ads not only in Google Ads placements but also on a number of other platforms.

DV360 allows us to reach 99% of Ukrainian Internet users, expanding YouTube’s capabilities. Potentially, this is +1 million people to almost the entire YouTube audience. That is, these are premium users whom advertising “catches up” with on partner sites.

In our campaigns, we use DV360 at least in 60% of cases. And there are reasons for this. DV360 provides the largest reach (as we discussed at the beginning), high-quality control over the frequency of impressions. It also differs from publicly available Google Ads in terms of deeper analytics and, accordingly, wider optimization tools based on it.

Cost of advertising on DV360

We have determined that the price for similar formats in Google Ads and DV360 is different. We emphasize that these price fluctuations are more related to the volume we mentioned at the beginning. Skippable ads in DV360 are slightly more expensive, while non-skippable ads are cheaper. 

But there is a difference in banner ads. If we look at traffic-generating campaigns, DV360 has much lower prices. As for reach campaigns, the price increase is due to the higher viewability of impressions.

Meta

The Meta platform includes Facebook, Instagram, a number of partner sites, and WhatsApp messenger, which is not very popular in Ukraine. Overall, it has a fairly high potential reach: 10.7 million on Instagram and 12 million on Facebook.

 Instagram will allow you to reach the youngest audience, which is why it stands out among other available platforms, and the percentage of young people is the highest here. Another advantage is 100% viewability across the platform’s formats.

Cost of advertising on Facebook and Instagram

In terms of prices, Facebook has the highest click-through rate for banner ads compared to Google. However, one should be careful with video ads, and if compared on average, Facebook can lose out to YouTube and other platforms.

On Instagram, we used two of the most common options: banners in stories and reels videos. Instagram is currently experiencing constant competition and oversaturation with ads. There are a lot of small advertising campaigns and they push the price up. When using this platform, you need to clearly understand that it is your audience that is there and it is your product that will be promoted there and will be valuable to users. Otherwise, you will simply lose here in terms of price compared to other platforms.

Full video view on Facebook and Instagram

If you use Meta Ads wisely, you can compete with Google’s tools in terms of fully viewing videos.

We compared the data on video views to the end of a six-second video and saw that Facebook itself does not give such high viewership, but on certain placements the percentage reaches 72 and the price is not so high.

On affiliate networks, video views to the end are extremely high, 92%, but you have to keep in mind that this is rewarded video. This is a format for which the user can receive a reward in the application they are using, for example, an additional move in a mobile game. If your audience is there, you can use it and get the entire video viewed. 

If you look at the average price, you can compete with YouTube’s prices if you use certain platforms and not average everything.

Conclusion

Overall, we are sharing a digital guide to the prices and key indicators of various digital instruments as of the summer of 2024. Among the tools already discussed, we have added direct placements. We work with directs and advise others to do so, because here you can get access to unique formats that are not available anywhere else.

In general, the audience is getting smaller, but it is more active online, the market and purchasing power are growing instead of slipping into a crisis. Doing business is difficult, but the advertising market is also developing along with the consumer market.

Don’t act in a cookie-cutter way; there are plenty of non-standard opportunities to optimize efficiency in all tools outside the framework.