Yandex.Direct vs Google Ads in 2026 for the Russian market: when which one, CPC/CPL benchmarks, budget migration

In 2026, every Russian client who previously worked on Google Ads has accumulated 3 years of alarming silence “what about now.” There is no longer any need to explain that Google Ads is not available from Russia. It is useful to explain something else: which tasks actually remained with Google, which tasks were previously assigned to it out of habit, and where Yandex Direct overtook not because of sanctions, but because of algorithms. Below I compare the two platforms not from the position of “better/worse”, but from the position of “where exactly to put ₽”.

I have been working with Yandex Direct since 2018, with Google Ads - from 2017 to March 2022, closely, then - in fits and starts through foreign accounts for arbitration and RU-language products. The numbers in the article are real benchmarks from my current 6 projects (e-com, MedTech, EdTech, e-sports rental, B2B software) and 2 projects in which I run Google Ads from Armenia to a RU audience outside the Russian Federation.

The main question in 2026 is not “Yandex Direct or Google Ads”. The main question is “how does this business deal with margins and attribution for the discussion to make sense.” Without these two numbers, any choice of office is a guess.

1. When does this question even arise in 2026?

Once every two weeks, some founder writes to me: “listen, we used to have everything on Google Ads, we froze it in March 2022, and now we want it back - it’s best for us.” Under this request there are usually three different cases, and each has its own solution.

Case A - RF business, RF clients, RU domain. Here Google Ads is no longer a player. Not because “it’s impossible in principle,” but because the auction is empty, the inventory has dried up. If you have a pizzeria in Tula, a B2B service for accountants, or an aesthetic dentistry clinic, forget about Google and collect everything in Yandex Direct.

Case B - RU-language product for audiences outside the Russian Federation. EdTech, sell programming courses to relocants in Serbia and Armenia. SaaS for Russian freelancers in Tbilisi. Here Google Ads is alive - it’s simply set up from a non-Russian account and targets specific countries. Yandex Direct does not work for such a task: its traffic is within the Russian Federation.

Case B - arbitrage and “gray” verticals. Crypto, forex, gambling, nutra. These verticals are either prohibited in Yandex Direct or are so moderated that the ad only lasts 30 seconds. Google Ads for Western GEOs is a standard channel for affiliate marketers, but this is no longer about brand marketing, but about a different discipline.

Next, I talk mainly about Case A - this is 80%+ of my requests and 80%+ of the readers of this article.

2. How do the platforms really differ (and not as they say in courses)

In most “guides,” the comparison comes down to screenshots of the interface and the phrase “both are excellent platforms.” This is not a comparison, this is politeness. The real difference is in four places: auction, ad format, audience, attribution. I'll take turns.

The main difference that marketers usually do not voice to clients is: Yandex Direct is marketing within the closed Yandex ecosystem. When a user sees your ad, the neural network already knows everything about it: what he looked for in Search a week ago, where he lives according to Maps, what categories he watches on the Market, what genre of movies he likes on Kinopoisk. These are signals that cannot be collected from the outside.

Google Ads outside the Russian Federation works similarly, but in the RU segment this is no longer the case. Therefore, even for the RU-language audience in Serbia, Google Ads behaves weaker than it seems based on the figures from 2021.

3. Auction: Hummingbird vs Smart Bidding

An auction is where marketers lose money without understanding what is happening. Briefly, without academicism.

Hummingbird (Yandex Direct) — a neural network that decides not “who has a higher bid,” but “whose impression will bring more money to the platform, taking into account the likelihood of a click and subsequent conversion.” If your landing page converts well, Kolibri will show you for broader queries, even if the bid is lower than a competitor. If it converts poorly, you will be strangled, no matter what bet you place.

Smart Bidding (Google Ads) — about automatic bidding for a specific goal: tCPA, tROAS, Maximize Conversions. The logic is similar, but Google focuses primarily on historical campaign data, rather than user signals from neighboring services. Therefore, Smart Bidding is VERY demanding on the volume of conversions - at least 30-50 per month, otherwise it’s guessing.

Practical conclusion: you can start with Yandex Direct with a small budget and the neural network will quickly understand your audience through behavioral signals. In Google Ads, you need to “let the machine learn” - spend 2-3 weeks on broad queries until tCPA stabilizes. The “training” budget for Google Ads is 80-150k rubles, which you lose honestly and don’t do anything about it.

4. Creatives: TGO vs RSA

TGO (text-image ad in Yandex Direct) and RSA (Responsive Search Ad in Google) are different philosophies.

In Yandex Direct you write 3 fixed titles and 1 description, and the same ones are shown every time. To test options, you create several ads in one ad-group, and the platform itself runs the rotation. High control, high transparency.

In Google Ads you upload up to 15 titles and 4 descriptions, and the algorithm itself collects combinations on the fly. This is convenient for “not very experienced” marketers: there is no need to guess what headline will come up. The downside is that you lose control over what exactly appeared to the user at the moment of clicking, and you cannot properly A/B test headings.

In my current projects, I write 4-6 ads for each ad-group for Yandex Direct and monitor the CTR of each. I load as many options as possible into Google Ads and look at the report on combinations in 2-3 weeks - there is not enough data before.

I posted a complete analysis of the TGO settings in guide to Yandex Direct 2026. Prompt templates for generating 4-6 creatives at a time via Claude - in article about 7 imperatives of a marketer.

5. Attribution after Universal Analytics closes

Universal Analytics was closed in July 2024, and most RF teams moved to GA4 with difficulty. By 2026, the situation is this: Y. Metrika is on purely Russian projects, GA4 is on multi-regional projects in parallel, and both are on “hybrid” ones. Ya. Metrica as a replacement for UA is working, but GA4 gives a different depth.

Key Difference: Ya.Metrika works by last-click attribution by default, GA4 - data-driven with a channel competition. If you have a long customer journey (B2B software, real estate, MedTech with expensive procedures), last-click underestimates the first touch and overestimates the closing channels. In my MedTech case, the difference between last-click and data-driven reached 40% in the ROAS of individual campaigns - this is not rounding.

I wrote more about attribution after closing cookies in separate article about post-cookies attribution.

6. Benchmarks CPC, CPL, ROAS by niches of the Russian Federation (2026)

The numbers below are the median from my current 6 RF projects and correspondence with 12 colleagues from the Performance Russia chat. This is not VTsIOM, this is a marketing cross-section.

The numbers grew by 35-50% in 2024-2025 - this is a direct result of the fact that almost all budgets were concentrated in Yandex Direct. The auction became denser, the rates increased. By 2026-2027, I expect another +20-25% to these figures, plus an increase in competition in YAN due to the compression of coverage channels.

How to combine these figures with the unit-economy of a business - in article about LTV/CAC benchmarkshow to calculate ROAS correctly - in article about ROAS/CPL formulas.

7. Migration of budget from Google Ads to Yandex Direct - 5 steps

If you are stuck with data in your Google Ads account from 2021-2022 and you don’t understand how to use it in Yandex Direct, here’s a step-by-step guide.

Step 1. Unload the semantic core and impression history. Via Google Ads Editor - export of all keywords, negative keywords, ads and CPC/CTR history for the last 90 days of the campaign. Format: CSV.

Step 2. Clean and re-enrich the semantics for the Russian Federation. Run through Ya.Wordstat and Key Collector - remove the real frequency in the RU segment, add low-frequency queries that were not in Google (the specifics of search patterns in the Russian Federation are different).

Step 3. Rebuild the structure of campaigns for the Yandex Direct auction. Group by intent, not by exact match. Yandex Direct works better with wider ad-groups of 30-50 requests than with micro-groups of 3-5.

Step 4. Rewrite texts to TGO format and headings. RSA does not work directly: Yandex Direct expects a fixed 3 headers + 1 description. Each ad-group receives 2-3 ad variations.

Step 5. Launch with a manual strategy, after 14 days - switch to an automatic conversion strategy. Immediately an auto strategy = waste of the budget: the neural network does not know your audience. Allow 30+ conversions to accumulate and then enable “pay for conversions” or “target ad spend share.”

A realistic migration period for one product with 200-500 requests is 3-5 working days with a ready-made semantic core. Stable CPC requires 2-3 weeks of neural network training.

8. My experience: ez-katka for 124M ₽ via Yandex Direct

In 2023-2024, I led the marketing of EZ KATKA. The network reached 19 arenas; its turnover for 2024 amounted to 124 million rubles. The available materials do not contain an exact distribution of the performance budget between Yandex Direct, VK Ads, TG Ads and offline channels, so the comparison of sites below is not based on the unconfirmed split of this project.

The main insight on Yandex Direct for these 3 years: The Kolibri neural network finds a local audience much faster than it seems according to best practices. For each new city, I launched 1 search campaign + 1 on YAN with look-alike for existing clients from neighboring cities - and in 5-7 days Kolibri collected an audience that was 25% cheaper than manual geotargeting.

What didn’t work was an attempt to transfer the logic of Google Ads (many narrow ad-groups, manual bids, long lists of negative keywords). Yandex Direct is choking on excessive micro-segmentation: the algorithm learns better on a wider group with diverse semantics.

Case details with numbers - on ez-katka case page.

9. Output in 4 lines

If a business works for the Russian market, 80-90% of the budget is in Yandex Direct, period. Google Ads makes sense only for three tasks: RU audience outside the Russian Federation, gray verticals, YouTube pre-roll (through foreign accounts). Comparing platforms head-to-head in 2026 is an exercise from 2021: the market has changed, but the debate remains.

If you want, I will analyze your specific situation - write to Telegram or through form on the website. Starting consultation on choosing an account and benchmarks - 0 ₽, an hour of conversation on Zoom.

Related materials: CPC benchmarks in Yandex Direct, ROAS/ROMI calculator, a complete guide to performance marketing 2026.