Since we first began testing new designs, most Yandex Search users have come into contact with experimental SERP layouts. This doesn't come as a surprise, given that we launch new experiments each week.

Our latest experiments have involved both minor changes like new background colors or different column widths, as well as more major innovations. In this post, we'll fill you in on the changes we've recently implemented and others we are testing right now.

We are proud to announce the arrival of the new and improved Turbo page in Yandex.Direct. Among the features we added to the new Turbo pages are the option to set goals for your statistics and a new template in Turbo Page Builder for selling products, along with other improvements.

If you haven't tried out Turbo pages for your ads in Yandex.Direct yet, now is еру time to start: shorter loading times for smartphones mean lower bounce rates and improved conversion rates.

Zabaykalsky Krai and the Republic of Buryatia, previously part of the Siberian Federal District, are now included in the Far Eastern Federal District. The geotargeting tree in Yandex.Direct will soon reflect recent administrative changes in the list of Russian federal districts. Please check your campaign settings if you apply bid adjustments for the region or use the API.

Recent improvements to our forecasting algorithms mean that you can now use strategies like "Average CPA" and "Weekly budget: Maximum conversions" for new Dynamic ad and Text & Image ad campaigns right from the get-go, without waiting to accumulate statistics.

Creating campaigns for ads for mobile apps in Yandex.Direct is even faster and simpler thanks to our most recent updates, which are already available for new clients. Soon they will be ready for all users. Keep reading to find out what's changed.

When creating Turbo pages in Yandex.Direct, you can can choose between two types of Yandex.Metrica tags: a preset tag with automatically generated goals, or a custom tag for which you should set your own goals. You can change the tag type at any time.

Beta testing for Dynamic ads is now complete. From cosmetics to real estate, Dynamic ads are available for most business types. Dynamic ads are a universal tool for online stores with constantly changing product ranges, and simple enough that even new advertisers can use them. Most importantly, they make it possible to achieve all sorts of goals while keeping spending under control.

When it comes to determining which goals are most important for a certain ad campaign, we are sure that you know best. Now the Yandex.Direct interface makes it possible for you to designate the goals that are most important in your campaign and set specific conversion values for them.

Yandex.Direct is stepping up to a new level with video ads available for Text & Image campaigns. Set bids, adapt ad texts and titles, and apply bidding strategies and budget limits separately for video ads, without affecting your other ads.

Thousands of patients from across the world come to the Hadassah clinic, one of the largest in Israel, for medical care each year. In December of 2016, the international medical tourism company Health Plus International Medical Adviser became Hadassah’s exclusive partner and took on their marketing department functions. In one year, the company succeeded in increasing the number of target leads by an impressive 69%. Keep reading this success story to find out how Yandex.Direct helped them reach these exceptional results.

Display campaigns are ideal for strengthening brand loyalty. They attract your target audience into the sales funnel, where you can then continue communicating with them via contextual ads and retargeting.

To make the entire ad purchasing process even easier, you can now manage your display campaigns in the Direct API.

This week, the “Manual bid management” strategy in Yandex.Direct will be replaced by the “Manual bid management with optimization in ad networks” strategy. This means that Yandex algorithms will help make sure that ads receive as many possible conversions in ad networks while remaining within the set budget limits, regardless of the strategy selected. 

We have been improving the algorithms used to purchase traffic in the Yandex Advertising Network for some time and are now ready to launch them in full. In the next two weeks, the “Manual bid management” strategy will automatically switch to the new “Manual bid management with optimization in ad networks.” The improved strategy will help to attract users ready for conversion on sites in ad networks. Their readiness to convert offers advertisers an important benefit: lower CPA.

Display campaigns are a new auction product available in Yandex.Direct with CPM payment. Display campaigns allows you to show HTML5 and image banners in the Yandex Advertising Network to audiences with the characteristics and interests that you determine.

Two new age groups have appeared for bid adjustments and statistics in Yandex.Direct. They will allow advertisers to show ads to their target audiences with greater flexibility and precision.

Previously available to some of our clients as a closed beta, Direct's Turbo pages are now available to everyone.

Web page loading time, as well as website quality, is crucial when someone is looking for a product or service to buy online. Direct's Turbo pages boost your conversions and improve your customer engagement on mobile by providing you with a quick-loading mobile landing page, instead of a page that takes ages to load, doesn't load at all, or is simply not designed for viewing on smartphones or tablets.

Denis Zlobin, Project Manager

We believe that the top questions on the app marketers' minds today are: Where to scale next and where to get more users? Is user acquisition enough? How can I save time on boring tasks and do more creative work instead?

It has been a long time since Yandex.Direct moved from being a search advertising tool for responding to customer demand to a versatile marketing platform providing solutions for every step of the customer journey, in multiple formats and with a variety of buying models.

Eugene Lomize, Director of Strategic Development at Yandex, spoke at the YES conference about the direction Yandex.Direct is currently moving, what has already changed, and why autopilot marketing is so important. Let's have a look.

Interview with Yandex Global Sales Director Bernard Lukey

As businesses around the world are moving more and more of their advertising budgets towards performance marketing, they pay more attention to conversion rates for mobile traffic and are falling in love with video-enabled ads. Yandex not only observes these same trends in Russian market, but is helping shape them. We asked Bernard Lukey what tools Yandex offers its clients to achieve their goals and respond to global trends, which industries yield the biggest revenues from their business in Russia, and which areas are still developing.

Video extensions in Yandex.Direct continue to show good results, with higher click and conversion rates than regular Text & Image ads. We are not ready to rest on our laurels just yet, however, so we will tell you about to changes you can make to your video extensions to improve their performance and the quality of your contact with users even further, and how this can raise conversions along your sales funnel.