First, let's mention what we'd always known was true: the frequency of impressions throughout the week is not constant. The general rule that we have now proven is this: during peak hours on weekdays, campaigns with manual strategies run out of funds and their impressions come to a halt until the next day, but on weekends these same campaigns fail to spend the funds allocated by their daily budget

The second conclusion was the less expected one. As soon as the clock strikes midnight, advertisers using standard display mode begin battling for traffic, leading many campaigns to a) quickly spend their budgets and b) miss out on traffic during the day and evening — the time when most users interested in their products are actively searching for them.

In order to balance your spending in relation to the amount of traffic available to advertisers, we decided to change the standard behavior of the Daily Budget option. These changes will occur in two major steps:

1.     How the new Daily Budget in standard mode works now

If this option is enabled in your campaign, Yandex.Direct strives to distribute your funds evenly over the course of the day (within the limits you set as part of your time targeting settings). When there is a risk of your campaign finishing too early, i.e. the remaining funds are insufficient to continue , Yandex.Direct will temporarily switch to the distributed mode to increase your chances of coming into contact with your target audience, whether morning, day, or night.  This change has already come into effect.

2.     How standard mode will work in the near future

Yandex.Direct will assess statistics related to unspent funds in your daily budget over a seven-day period. If there are considerable "leftovers" in your account, they will be used to purchase additional clicks when your campaign reaches peak activity levels. Let's say that you set a daily budget of 400 rubles. On weekdays, your budget will be spent on clicks from users who see your ads mainly in the morning, but your spending on weekends, on the other hand, won't exceed 250 rubles, not even reaching the daily limit you set.

The new Daily Budget will take any funds that were not used on Saturday and Sunday and redistribute them to be spent during the most active days of the week. This practice has a visible effect — a reduction of the gap between your active demand and the amount of traffic your budget can purchase:

At the same time, your average spending will remain within the limits of 400 rubles per day. Once the time has come for this change to come into effect, we'll be in touch with you.

What about the other modes?

Advertisers will no longer have access to the old version of the standard Daily Budget option (the one that spends the advertiser's funds as quickly as possible).

We recommend that advertisers who want to maintain a strict daily budget limit switch to the Distributed display mode. This mode will spend funds left over from less active days when a certain's day's allocated funds are insufficient to respond to increased demand.