As we previously mentioned, we are gradually moving display products to Yandex.Direct, which is becoming the one-stop shop for all Yandex advertising. Today, we are ready to share concrete information about when different products will become available in Yandex.Direct, as well as the deadline for moving your campaigns over from Yandex.Display.

Not long ago, we conducted an analysis of the standard mode of the Daily Budget manual strategy. This analysis led us to two interesting conclusions: one of them was expected but unconfirmed, and the other, a real discovery.

Yandex.Direct is gradually becoming an all-in-one platform where you can communicate with your customers at every step of the sales funnel — from generating interest in your products to changing customers' statuses from "previous" to "repeat."

Yandex has presented a new concept for the future development of Yandex.Direct. What previously served as a service for placing contextual ads is now transforming into a platform for all advertising formats. Automation will gradually play a greater and greater role in the creation and management of ad campaigns in Yandex.Direct, and make it easier for advertisers to reach the goals they set.

Not long ago we published the documentation for the KeywordBids service in the open beta version of the Direct API. Now the service is available in the full version of the Direct API. You can begin testing your applications and get ready for the launch of the new bid setting interface in Yandex.Direct.

You have probably already heard about the upcoming changes in Yandex.Direct. In mid-April, our auctions will switch their target: previously, the bids you set competed for certain positions, but will soon compete for specific volumes of clicks instead. As part of these changes, we will be launching a new interface for setting bids.

Smart banners have finished beta testing and are now available to all advertisers in the Yandex.Direct interface. Just in time for this event, we have significantly expanded the list of business types that can use smart banners, considerably increased their launch speed, and made lots of other useful adjustments.

As we announced in February, the bid limit of 2500 RUB no longer applies in Yandex.Direct. Instead of paying attention to technical limits, we recommend setting bids no higher than you are actually willing to pay for a click.

Moscow. Yandex and AVITO have reached agreements under which the largest classified advertisement site in Russia will increase the amount of advertising inventory it sells to the Yandex Advertising Network. Yandex, from its end, has optimized the quality and effectiveness of ad impressions on AVITO using its own proprietary technology.

You can now combine phone numbers and email addresses from your CRM data in one file to create segments in Yandex.Audience. This means segments based on CRM data are available to far more advertisers than before — these two sources make it much easier to reach the required 1000 data strings to create a segment.

Now that closed beta testing is complete, we would like to invite all interested advertisers to get to know the newly updated media-contextual banners (MCB) . If you have not tried this format yet, you can now do so in Yandex.Direct even without a Yandex manager or an external agency.

Video ads have proven to be a great solution for raising brand awareness while also working well as part of performance campaigns. The new tools we have recently added help you meet the goals you set for your video ads.

Starting today, you will notice a new addition to Yandex.Direct: display campaigns in pay-per-click format. You can now place HTML5 banners in the Yandex Advertising Network, for audiences with the characteristics and interests that you choose yourself.

Over the years we have adapted our search engine results page (SERP) to meet each user’s individual needs better and to provide a high-quality user experience. The layout of search ads takes into account each user’s needs, the given query and other competitors' ads. More relevant ads result in more efficient advertising, increased user satisfaction, and improved advertising performance with higher conversion rates and an increase in traffic.

We continually test various ad layouts and their placement on the SERP to achieve optimal results for both our users and advertisers. In the future, we plan to expand the variety of layouts. We will algorithmically select the best layout depending on a wide range of factors.

In addition to the changes in the SERP ad layouts, we will also make the auction process more transparent. In April, these changes will be reflected in both the Yandex Direct interface and API.

There's a new type of bid adjustment available in Yandex.Direct, one we mentioned in an earlier post. These new adjustments make it easier to manage your ads with video content, and work just like other bid adjustments.

Please note that as of the end of February, we will no longer use the term “maximum cost per click” in Yandex.Direct.

The question of how and when to optimize your campaigns is impossible to answer without the right information. In Yandex.Direct, your most important tool on this front is Report Wizard. We recently added three experimental indicators to Report Wizard that we hope will make it even more useful: Engaged sessions (ES),  Cost per Engaged session, and Engaged session rate.

As promised last week, Yandex.Direct now generates video extensions by default.

It wasn't so long ago that video extensions appeared in Yandex.Direct, but we are already observing positive results: they catch users' attention more often, their СTR is higher and their CPA is lower than for ads without video. We've decided to take another step forward — now Yandex.Direct can turn any text ads with images into video.

Yandex.Direct will soon become the one-stop shop for all your Yandex advertising campaigns.