“More and more advertisers are entrusting the management of their campaigns to automatic strategies. Our machine learning technology takes thousands of factors into account, which is quite difficult to do manually. Newly added features allow these strategies to cover larger amounts of target traffic and improve the performance of campaigns in Yandex.Direct,” said Maria Baybik, head of Yandex.Direct’s development team.

How will the new strategy work?

"Manual bid management with optimization in ad networks" allows you to maximize the number of conversions within your set budget by redistributing funds to those impressions and clicks that are most likely to lead to conversions on your site. Yandex.Direct will continue to use your bids for each keyword, automatically lowering your bids for unpromising clicks and raising them for clicks more likely to bring good results. 

This optimization is made possible by the experience Yandex.Direct has accumulated in predicting conversion probability. For more than two years, this technology has helped clients get an average of 5% more conversions without changing their budget. During that time, this technology has improved the accuracy of its predictions. If you want even better conversion predictions, we strongly recommend installing Yandex.Metrica on your site and setting up goals. Adding a Yandex.Metrica tag is easy, and we even have a tutorial that can take you through the process step by step.

Robots have been helping with ad networks for a long time

Regardless of your selected strategy, bids and CPC are always calculated individually for each impression based on both the quality of the host site and the specific user viewing the ad. This is necessary for several reasons. First, competition is high, and not just from businesses similar to yours. Your competition includes, in theory, anything the user finds interesting. Second, the number of slots in an ad block and the layout of the host site are different each time. Moreover, users on YAN sites don’t always have a specific query as they do on search. 

These changes will come into effect in Yandex.Direct within the next two weeks

In the Yandex.Direct, Direct API and Direct Commander interfaces, the “Manual bid management” for ad networks will be replaced by the new "Manual bid management with optimization in ad networks.” All your bids will stay the same, and you have the option to change them yourself, as always.

If you are interested in optimizing other campaign indicators, you can switch to a different strategy for ad networks at any moment, e.g. an automatic strategy for optimizing CPA, ROI or your weekly budget, etc.

If you are currently applying a combined manual strategy “On all sites,” it will remain manual on search, but will switch to "Manual bid management with optimization in ad networks” for ad networks. 

External management systems will still work. We are doing our best to make sure this switch causes you as little inconvenience as possible, so that that only thing you notice are your improved results.  

If you want to make changes before the changes come into effect, you can already do so now.