Impressions on search Y. Direct: why you pay 1.5 times more per click

In the last quarter, I was faced with the fact that all my contextual advertising clients working in highly competitive niches had a dramatic drop in CTR (click-through rate) on search.

When splitting into keywords, devices, and ad groups, the reason could not be identified. However, when the campaigns were broken down by gender and age, a noticeable anomaly emerged: groups of people with uncertain demographic characteristics have up to 87% of impressions with almost zero CTR.


Figure 1. Report to Yandex Direct on a search company with characteristics of crushing gender and age

How do you know if you have a pay-per-click impression?

It is necessary to build a report on the advertising campaigns that interest us in J. Direct:


The first sign of search engine impression boosts is a drop in clickthrough rate (CTR).

“CTR (clickability, from the English. Click-Through Rate) is the ratio of the number of clicks on an ad to the number of its impressions, measured in percent. We can say that this indicator determines the effectiveness of the ad "

- Glossary J. Direct .

The next sign of the presence of “extra” impressions on the search is a noticeable increase in the cost of a click and a drop in the effectiveness of the advertising campaign.

The cost of a click on a Direct search depends on the click through rate of ads (CTR): the higher your CTR, the higher the quality of the ad, the lower the cost of a click.


Figure 6. Direct correlation between increase in CTR and decrease in click cost

As a result of elimination of search impression cheat, the average CTR of an advertising campaign increased from 6.39% to 15.75%, and the price of a click on the most competitive requests fell by 63% from 79.66 p. up to 50.59 p. (due to an increase in CTR).


Figure 7. Increase in CTR from 6.39 to 15.75 and drop in average search click cost

Yandex Direct does not care about the purity of competition between advertisers

In the example at the very beginning of the article, 87% of ad impressions belonged to a demographic group with the status “gender and age are not defined”. With a clickability in all other well-represented gender and age groups from 10.5% to 36.3% in the “indefinite” group, the CTR was only 0.31% in the search.

It is obvious that it is not difficult for Direct to find and eliminate such foci of inappropriate ad impressions, but he not only does not take any action to solve the problem , but also limits the possibility of an independent solution .

What methods of dealing with cheating had to be tried before finding a solution

The most obvious way to solve this problem is to set a bid adjustment of -100% for people with an unknown gender and age in search advertising campaigns suffering from an abnormal drop in CTR and an increase in click price. However, J. Direct did everything to make this method impossible to apply!

When trying to create adjustments for “undefined” gender and age, the advertiser is faced with the fact that it is impossible to choose the demographic group of interest to him (a group in which gender and age are not defined at the same time).

A more tortured advertiser will ask: “What if I can raise bids for all other specific sex and age groups, thus depriving myself of an undetermined gender and age?” And then careful Yandex envisioned everything: when we try to create the necessary adjustments, we’ll first in the limit on the number of adjustments, and secondly, we quickly understand that we can only choose the combination “gender is not defined” + “age is determined” and “gender is determined” + ”age is not determined”, but it’s not a treasured combination, in which P ol and age are not simultaneously determined.


Figure 8. The link “gender and age is not defined” does not work

How to beat impressions on Search Direct

First of all, if we delve into the nature of the promotion of impressions by undefined gender and age, we notice that these are almost always artificially generated queries with zero clicks and 1-2 impressions for each unique query combination.


Figure 9. Report on requests for which there is a cheat

The resulting report will look something like the picture attached below, the number of unique combinations of “left” queries can reach 10,000 and 30,000. Anticipating the solution to the problem - negative keywords, I’ll say right away: there’s not enough capacity for the list of negative keywords, Yandex and took care of this. In my case, the capacity of negative keywords was only ⅓ necessary.


Figure 10. Report on requests for which there is a cheat

It is interesting that the wrapping semantics are often built up by parsing words that people use on the Internet to describe your product or service, and Yandex.Collections are the favorite source of “new vocabulary” for bots.

So, having built the above report, you will notice that the wrapping goes along the “long tail of the request”. And the first, most effective way to solve the problem of promotion of impressions is to work on the structure of advertising through the types of correspondence of Y. Direct . It is necessary to translate as many queries as possible into exact correspondence (quotation marks), word order, and so on. At the same time, stopping key phrases that are under attack is not worth it. And for requests protected by suitable Direct operators , you need to create a separate advertising campaign.

Secondly, it’s necessary to protect the queries remaining under attack by negative keywords selected from the “Search Queries” report shown above. Moreover, in order to try to circumvent the Yandex.Direct limit in the number of negative keywords, you can use negative keywords both at the level of “infected” campaigns and at the level of ad groups.

Thirdly, knowing the tendency to “drain” CTR for an indeterminate gender and age in Direct, it is necessary to regularly monitor the promotion of impressions. ConceptDirect can help with simple reporting and notification.


Figure 11. Methods of dealing with search impression wrapping

Useful links:

• Help Yandex Direct;
• How Yandex calculates the cost per click .

Who also faced a similar cheat of impressions - write your cases in the comments, we will try to help each other!

I am always in search of interesting and large-scale contextual advertising projects, for cooperation I am available at the contacts below.