Yandex Direct: from scratch to the first campaign

Yandex Direct is the main performance channel in Russia. For 2026 via Direct about 70% of all paid search traffic and more than half of contextual traffic media women This chapter is a working introduction: what really matters in the office, what— decoration, how to choose between manual bets and auto strategies, and why negative keywords often save more than bid optimization.

cabinet structure: what is important, what decoration

Direct hierarchy: account → client → campaign → group → ad. Budget set at the campaign level, bids and targeting at the group, creative and texts - at the ad level. This is what it looks like on paper. In practice, 80% of the work performed in two places: “Campaigns” (launch, budget, strategy) and “Search” conversions” / Ya. Metrika (result analysis).

What is important right away: setting goals in Y.Metrica (without this Direct will not learn optimize), correct UTM markup at the group level, negative keywords at the campaigns, correct setup of retargeting through Metrica segments. Everything else - interface goodies, which we return to as our budget grows.

search vs YAN: two different games

Yandex search is a hot demand. The user entered the request “buy dance mat", we appear in the first line in the search results with a relevant title and a link to landing page for this request. The conversion here is high (usually 4–10% in e-com), but the price is also the clique is expensive (from 30 to 200 ₽ in competitive niches).

YAN (Yandex Advertising Network) is hundreds of thousands of partner sites: news, weather services, forums. Advertising is shown contextually (by interest) or retargeting (by behavior on our website). The cost of a click is 3–5 times cheaper than on search, but the conversion is also 2–3 times lower. YAN gives volume and works at the top of the funnel. More details in glossaries - what is YAN.

A healthy starting layout: 60–70% of the budget for search, 30–40% for YAN. After 1–2 months We look at CPA by channel and redistribute it. We always launch search and YAN campaigns separate - Yandex itself has been demanding this since 2023, and that’s right: they have different optimization logic.

manual bets vs auto strategies 2026

Autostrategies in Direct have greatly improved over the past two years. For 2026 for For most tasks, they work better than manual bets - but only under two conditions: a sufficient volume of conversions (from 30 per week per campaign) and a stable goal in Ya. Metrica. Without these conditions, automation “gets lost” and wastes the budget on irrelevant audience.

Basic set of auto strategies 2026:

• “Maximize conversions with cost per conversion” (CPA). Pay only for achieving the goal. Ideal for those who know the target CPA. Disadvantage: the algorithm can greatly reduce the volume of impressions if the goal is “expensive”.
• “Maximize conversions with pay-per-clicks.” We pay for clicks optimize for conversions. An intermediate option, good for starting when the goal is CPA not yet clear.
• "Maximum clicks with limitation." A simple strategy for the top funnels. We use it when volume is needed, and conversion is a matter of landing.
• Target Share of Advertising Spend (tROAS). For e-com with upgraded to Metrica with revenue. The algorithm optimizes for a given ROAS.

Manual bidding makes sense in two scenarios: niche B2B campaigns with 5–20 key campaigns words and ceiling for each request, or remarketing with a very narrow segment an audience where the algorithm has nothing to learn from. In all other cases in 2026 the auto strategy beats the handbrake on the horizon of 2–4 weeks.

negative keywords: where the savings are greater than from bets

Negative keywords cut out irrelevant impressions and in 90% of cases save more than any bid optimization. Basic list of negative keywords at the start of any campaign in Russia: “free”, “download”, “torrent”, “reviews”, “do it yourself”, “instructions”, “photo”, “video”, “abstract”, “coursework”, “GOST”, “vacancy”, “job”, “salary”, “used”, “Avito” (if you don’t have Avito), “second hand”.

Next is the minus for a specific niche through Direct’s search analytics. Every 1–2 weeks in the first month we check “Search queries” in the account and add irrelevant in the minus. After 3 months, the list grows to 200–500 negative keywords, and the campaign they begin to work noticeably cleaner.

audiences, segments, retargeting

Ya.Metrika sends four types of segments to Direct: behavioral (page visitors, spent 30+ seconds), conversion (reached goals), target (CRM segments, imported via Yandex.Audience), look-alike (similar to conversion ones).

The basic set of audiences that we create in the first week:

1. “All website visitors for 90 days” – for general retargeting.
2. “Achieved a key goal in 30 days” - for exclusion from new campaigns.
3. “Abandoned Cart” is a separate campaign with the most aggressive CPC.
4. “Regular customers from CRM” - for look-alike and for exclusion.
5. “LAL by customers, accuracy 1” - cold traffic with a similar profile.

Learn more about working with audiences in chapter 8, about retargeting - in chapter 7.

quality score and its influence

Yandex does not publish the “quality score” as a separate figure, but the actual CPC is highly depends on three parameters: ad CTR, landing page relevance, behavioral factors (failures, time on site). A high quality score reduces CPC by 20–40% at the same position. See quality score definition in the glossary.

checklist for launching the first campaign in Direct

1. Connect Ya.Metrica, set up at least 3 goals (micro + macro).
2. Collect semantics: 30–80 keywords under one group.
3. Create 2-3 campaigns: Search-Brand, Search-Category, YAN.
4. Add at least 200 negative keywords to each campaign.
5. Create 2-3 ads per group for A/B testing.
6. Enable UTM markup: source/medium/campaign/term/content.
7. Set a daily budget with a margin of 30% of the calculated one.
8. Run “Maximum clicks” for the first 7 days to collect statistics.
9. On day 8 - switch to “Maximum conversions” when you get 30+ conversions.

We check the budget through CPA calculator and break-even ROAS, to understand how much a campaign can cost before it goes into the red.

in the next chapter

Chapter 5 - VK Ads. New office, formats, audiences, and where VK really is works better than Direct.