2020 saw all sorts of new challenges for many industries across Russia, while others seemed perfectly poised to take advantage of the exceptional conditions. One such example is the mobile gaming industry. Its lack of physical presence combined with the time spent on mobile devices (which had been increasing even before the onset of the pandemic) created a real perfect storm...in favor of mobile gaming. In this article, we'll take a look at the facts and figures surrounding the booming Russian market for gaming apps, and then look at how app owners and developers can promote their own products to Russian users.

Starting February 10, advertisers will have the option of disabling ad impressions on all sites except the Yandex Home page.

Every year, Yandex.Market and GfK Rus conduct an analysis of Russian audiences of online stores. This  research helps answer questions about the share of Russians who shop online, their frequency, motivators and deterrents to online shopping, payment and delivery options and more. Most of the observations apply not just for Russia as a whole, but for some of its major cities as well.

You can now find the right audience for your display ads in more ways than just user profile or keywords. This new targeting type helps you promote your products by focusing on the subject of video content or the pages that users view.

This winter, people across the English-speaking world are likely to be hearing the song “It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” more and more, but in Russia, it's all about New Year's Eve. In this article, we'll explain what else you need to know about advertising with Yandex.Direct during the holiday season and how to grab users' attention as they plan their holiday purchases.

In this article, we'll look at when to use CPM video ads, how to set them up for maximum effectiveness, and which indicators to use as your performance benchmarks. We have also put together a checklist with the most important tips for managing CPM videos.

Tracking important user actions on your site usually involves the help of developers. Even to set up a goal for users clicking a certain button, you need to edit the corresponding page's code. Not every site owner or marketing expert has the programming skills needed to make such changes, or the funds to hire someone to make them. Even if a company has an in-house developer, they are not always available to help set up goals at a moment's notice.

Yandex.Metrica now features a new report that makes it possible to compare the performance of different advertising channels. In this article, we'll tell you how to assess ROI with this new report that offers detailed information right down to the keyword level.

We have started testing call analytics in Yandex.Direct, which will allow advertisers to get detailed statistics on the campaigns, ads, or keywords that brought customer calls. Collecting these statistics will be possible by using a call tracking analytics number, which you can enable right in the Yandex.Direct interface.

Now available in all Yandex.Direct accounts: the new per conversion payment model. Testing has been successfully completed, and now any business, regardless of size or industry, can pay a specific price for targeted user actions, like placing an order on the site or filling out a request. And to do so, you don't even need to accumulate statistics in advance.

Yandex's Look-alike technology finds your potential customers among those similar (in interests or behavior) to your existing customers on the site. Now you can use simple settings in Yandex.Direct to easily show your ads to users who resemble current customers, even if you have very little data.

We have some good news if you set up ads for several important goals simultaneously. In Yandex.Direct, there are two new ways to use automatic strategies to do so: optimization of multi-step Yandex.Metrica goals and optimization of several priority goals.

After a fair fight for effectiveness, simplicity and user-friendliness, autotargeting came out victorious. Soon, it will become the primary tool for saving time on keyword selection in Yandex.Direct. As part of our plan to make managing campaigns easier and more transparent, we have revised the list of similar settings, and will close Related keywords.

In the current economic situation, using your advertising budget effectively takes on special importance. To help this happen, we have launched beta testing of a new option — "Pay for conversions" — that will allow you to invest your budget into reaching the goals most important for your business. We invite you to be among the first to try it and share your feedback with us.

Yandex recently received certification for its display advertising according to the international standards of the Media Rating Council. Starting on July 13, all display advertising sold via auction model will transition to the new standard, and a new cross-section with impressions viewable according to MRC standards will be counted in Yandex.Direct statistics. This transition will make it easier for advertisers to analyze international campaigns.

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.

For more than a year, one of our experiments has involved the limited placement of a banner above the search bar suggestions, where advertisers can instantly tell interested users about their offers. Recently, this banner has become available to everyone, so we decided it was the right time to talk about its advantages and the experiment’s results.

Independent bid management for impressions on desktop and mobile devices is now available in Yandex.Direct, meaning that you can focus on audiences on screens large and small, with separate creatives and traffic purchases customized by device type.

At Yandex, we know that no advertising tool can be so effective as to erase the need for data security, which is why we make it a priority for all Yandex.Direct advertisers. To maximize the security of your campaigns, we have added a special PIN code that only you can use to grant access to your campaigns when calling the customer service department.

Bringing users back to your site with ads in Yandex.Direct is now even easier. Using Yandex.Metrica, you can reach out to specific audiences with a relevant offer. Yandex.Metrica gathers the right users for you, and you can then address each segment with the right ads in Yandex.Direct. Keep reading to find out how to encourage people who have already been on your site to buy and find new customers.