To see the average bid amount for a campaign, tick the box next to the new indicator in Report Wizard:

You can do so at both the campaign and account levels.

The average bid began appearing in statistics this past Thursday. As a result, you can now see which bid your campaign entered into an auction, and in which cases your bid was raised or lowered by our algorithms. You can also be sure that your bid stays within the limits of your monthly budget.

Let's say you set a bid of 0.57 EUR. Now you can see in your statistics that even though your bid was raised to 0.68-0.83 EUR on some occasions, the system kept both your average CPC and your average bid within the limits of your target values:

Remember that the conversion optimization algorithm will only begin working in full force by the end of this year, so many advertisers will not be able to see its influence in their ad campaigns. 

We pay careful attention to your feedback and try to make all changes in Yandex.Direct as clear and comfortable for our advertisers. We hope that this new indicator will make analyzing your campaigns' performance easier.

Tip: No matter what statistics you view, we recommend analyzing data for the goals you set up for your campaign and sort the data by CPA.

This will allow you to concentrate on the real performance of your campaign and how the changes you are testing affect your campaign's performance. In any case, you can group your data for a selected period instead of by days and thereby get more illustrative results.

What statistical period should I check?

This wholly depends on how fast you are able to gather statistics — the more visitors your site has, the sooner you will be able to make your first conclusions. Larger businesses that attract hundreds and thousands of clicks can legitimately assess their statistics on a weekly basis, whereas sites with smaller audiences might be able to compile just a few dozen clicks for analysis each week.

If the campaign has been active for some time already, start by trying to assess your data on a monthly, quarterly or YoY basis, paying attention to the cost of your conversions, profit and other indicators that affect your campaign's performance directly. Once you've determined the overall trend, you can look more deeply at the specific periods that interest you.

What should I do if the average bid is higher than expected?

First, check the bid adjustments you set at the campaign and ad group levels.

Spikes in bids are generally caused by bid adjustments set for a specific target audience, e.g. +500% for users who already visited your site or who are from a region with exceptionally high conversion rates. Such hypotheses are easy to test in Report Wizard, where you can tick the cross-sections for bids you need.

The second most common reason is related to changes to your campaigns being activated. Let's say you lowered your bids at 11:40 PM on May 23. If you check right after midnight, you are likely to see a number of clicks at the previous prices in your statistics as the changes have not come into effect yet.

If you have any questions, feel free to send them to our specialists via the feedback form.