Tasty Traffic & Conversion
Traffic doesn't have to feel like advertising. Dozens of ways to bring people in and make them stay. Where the team expected a banner, I shipped story quizzes, hand-illustrated houses, and emotional design — formats Avito had never seen. No one asked for any of it. I found the budgets, art-directed the illustration, wrote the copy — and kept the dev effort low enough to hit every launch date.
THE TYPICALS
1
The team had a slot for a standard banner on building's page. I built a permanent product feature instead. I found the budget, hired the illustration studio, wrote the roadmap, promised the dates — and met every one of them. 20 real housing series from Soviet-era typical construction — stalinki, khrushchyovki, brezhnevki — the buildings still standing across Russia — people recognize their own childhood yard. Some hidden secrets in the windows — peep a bit. Lights on at night. Rare emotional design in a category that defaults to floor plans. Tens of millions see it every day.
THE HOLDOUTS
2
Cross-category traffic defaults to a constructor: generic banner, generic results — and real estate has no cross-sell anyway: too expensive, no upsell. Were I not to sell, I was pulling refusers in — 17% of those who'd picked a competitor app and never opened ours. I brought in my product marketing manager. Five content directions — the winner was a quiz that starts nowhere near real estate: "What home do you dream of, for real?" on a film photograph I'd shot in Yalta — shot won on first-clicks. Found the budget for the main-page slot — an auction against external advertisers, in the busiest ad week of the year — New Year. Got it anyway. 3–5 questions, then a redirect to listings matched to the answer: new build, resale, dacha, old stock, high floor. ~50% of starters reached items. Statistical significance. Same playbook in long-term rental: renters saw they could own a new build in their own neighborhood for the same monthly payment. Real matches. +11% DAU · +19% user interactions.
SEO IS THE NEW OIL
3
Rare expertise. Expensive, compounding. Spent over a year rebuilding Avito's real estate search visibility — page structure, FAQ blocks, UGC integration, data enrichment across listing and building pages. Pulled in historical building data, finishing options for new builds, infrastructure ratings, a real estate journal — every surface SEO could feed on. Wherever I worked on SEO: Google organic visits +38% off a thin baseline. Yandex top-3 visibility 15% → 18%. These are the numbers that keep paying out. SEO rewards patience.
UNDER ONE ROOF
4
Imagine a building that's been standing for two years. Some buyers are now reselling. Their listings and the developer's new units live on completely separate cards — as if the building doesn't recognize itself. How to solve it? Team had no answer for 7 years. I designed the way: one building, one card, new and resale side by side. Specs handed to dev. Shortlisted as the team's 2026 bigbet — I named it Zhdom. As a building's page grows denser — more data, more modules, more problems it solves — users risk losing their way. So I gave them one: anchor navigation. A scalable pattern that didn't stop at one page. It's now a native pattern in Avito's Design System, across every long card, every vertical. Block usage: up to +2.5%.