Yandex has passed the certification of its advertising for compliance with international MRC/IAB standards

June 23, 2020

We have been busy over the past few months making it possible for advertisers to work with a single standard for visibility in Russian and international advertising campaigns. To do so, Yandex successfully underwent the certification procedure of display ad visibility according to the universal standards of the Media Rating Council. The purchase of video ads is already performed according to MRC standards. We will begin transferring auctions for the purchase of banner ads to this standard in July.

What was evaluated during the certification process

All processes related to accounting of events, visibility, and anti-fraud on all platforms: desktop, mobile, and mobile apps. This assessment was carried out by the company IAB Tech Lab. In the course of their analysis, they checked that:

The video player and the codes that determine ad visibility work correctly, as does the advertising SDK in mobile apps on iOS and Android.
Banner moderation takes place according to the rules, all events are taken into account without errors.
Display advertising is shown only on verified sites of the Yandex Advertising Network, and banners display correctly on them.
Low-quality traffic is filtered out: anti-fraud systems do their job, and our developers are constantly improving them.
Statistics display correctly: impressions and clicks are correctly processed and displayed in reports, all metrics specified in the standard are present.

Certification allows us to provide Yandex advertisers with transparent statistics and apply universal MRC standards to the purchase of all auction display campaigns. We will start the transferring in July.

For example, we will only count impressions if at least 50% of the banner is in the visible area for one entire second. For video ads, the requirements are stricter — the video must continuously be in the user's field of vision for 2 seconds. These visibility rules will be in action starting from the next month.

The statistics for the number of visible impressions according to the MRC standard, as well as the number of impressions that did not meet the standard or for which the ad block size was not determined, will be available starting in July.

"Certification according to international MRC standards proves the quality of Yandex advertising technologies and the professional work of our team, since these standards set not only the level of software code and technical solutions, but also the development management processes," said Vladimir Mosin, head of advertising product development.

If you still have questions about MRC standards or certification, you can ask them on the customer service page, and we will answer them.