How to set up Yandex Direct yourself: a step-by-step guide

What to prepare before setup

Direct’s search ads show to people in response to their queries. More on what search advertising is and how it differs from other formats in a separate article. Before you open the account, it’s worth answering a few questions.

• What you’re advertising. At the start it’s easier to analyze one product or one line of business rather than your whole catalog at once.
• Where you’ll send people. You need a page that answers the query: what you offer, on what terms, how to reach you. It’s possible without a site too: in Campaign Builder, a couple of sentences about your business are enough, and you can also promote a Telegram channel or products on a marketplace. But everything said below about Metrica applies to a site: the tracking code is installed on its pages.
• Where and when to show. The region and the hours when you can take a call or respond to an inquiry.
• What counts as a result. An inquiry, a call, a purchase, a message in a messenger — the action you’re paying for the ad to produce.
• How much you’re ready to spend on testing. Decide on a test amount in advance. The figure in rubles depends on competition, the region and the strategy; there’s no universal number.
• Which account to work under. Decide which Yandex account you’ll run the ads and Metrica under, so access doesn’t end up with the wrong person.

Step 1. Install Yandex Metrica and set up goals

Start with measurement, not the campaign. Without goals, a strategy can’t optimize for inquiries, and you won’t see which queries bring in leads.

A goal in Yandex Metrica is a visitor action the site owner is interested in: visiting a specific page, clicking a button, following a link, paying for an order. There are many goal types: for example, «Page visit,» «Form submission,» «Click on a phone number,» «Go to messenger.» Metrica can create some goals automatically.

What to do:

1. Create a tracking tag and install it on every page of the site, as close to the top of the page as possible: that way it collects the most complete data.
2. Set up goals. Direct’s help documentation recommends creating several goals for different levels of engagement — for example, viewing a product, adding it to the cart, placing the order.
3. Check that the goal fires: send a test inquiry and make sure Metrica counted it.

You need to link the tracking tag to the ads in the campaign settings: the parameters have a «Metrica tags» field. In a Unified Performance Campaign, the site’s tracking tags and goals are added automatically when you specify the page being promoted.

Mark the actions most important to your business as priority actions — the new name in Direct for what used to be called key goals. Specifying them in the campaign settings helps Direct predict conversions more accurately. A conversion here is a completed priority action on the site.

Why this is step one: for the «Maximum conversions» strategy, the help documentation directly requires that the tracking code be installed on the site being promoted, and that the tracking tag have goals set up.

Step 2. Create a campaign and choose its type

How you create the campaign determines how many decisions you make yourself and how many Direct takes on. As of October 2026, the help documentation describes two interfaces and several campaign options.

A new account you create yourself opens in the Direct interface — the basic interface for beginners. The advanced interface is called Direct Pro, also known as expert mode. Keep in mind: once you switch from Direct to Direct Pro, you can’t go back.

Direct Pro also has other types: Product Campaign, Reach Advertising, Search Context Banner. For your first search campaign, these usually aren’t needed.

How to choose. If you want to manage targeting and bids yourself, you need Direct Pro: the help documentation describes it as an interface with advanced targeting and bidding settings. Steps 4–7 of this guide are written for that level of control. If there’s no time to figure it out, Campaign Builder or Easy Start will let you launch faster, but the system will make part of the decisions. Before switching to Direct Pro, remember once more that you can’t go back to the basic interface.

A couple of terms you’ll need further on. A campaign is the top level: it holds general settings, such as placements, strategy and schedule. Inside a campaign are ad groups: a set of ads and the impression conditions shared by them. Impression conditions are, for example, keyword phrases and autotargeting — covered in step 5.

Step 3. Set the campaign’s goal, strategy and budget

A strategy is a set of settings that helps solve the campaign’s task: for example, drawing traffic to the site or getting the most useful actions. Strategies come with manual or automatic control.

• Manual control. You set the bid for each impression condition yourself and, if needed, limit the weekly budget. A bid is the maximum amount you’re ready to pay for a click.
• Automatic control. You define the result the strategy should aim for. Direct’s help documentation recommends automatic strategies: they adjust the campaign far more often than you could do manually.

As of the check date, a UPC offers the strategies «Maximum conversions,» «Maximum profit,» «Maximum clicks,» «Maximum clicks with manual bids» (search only), and a package strategy. In «Maximum conversions,» you can choose payment per click or payment per conversion — that is, per priority action on the site.

Budget. Spend is limited by a weekly budget: you can set it both with manual control and in an automatic strategy. The help documentation won’t give you a specific figure: it depends on your task and the competition.

Don’t change the strategy mid-flight. The help documentation advises thinking the settings through before launch, so you don’t change them while the strategy is running: frequent restarts with different settings make it harder for the system to build a good forecast. If you change the goal or the attribution type, the strategy will need time to learn again.

Step 4. Set up the region, impression schedule and placements

Region. Impression regions are chosen from a list of countries, regions and cities, or by marking a point on a map with an impression radius. If you operate in several regions with different competition, the help documentation suggests splitting campaigns: that way bids for one region don’t have to be set with an eye on another.

Time. Time targeting is showing ads on a schedule. You can pick a template — for example, impressions daily during business hours — or set days and hours manually. With an hourly adjustment, the bid can be automatically raised or lowered at certain hours. It usually makes sense to show ads when you can answer a call or an inquiry.

Placements. In a UPC, placements are chosen from «Search,» «Advertising Network,» «Maps and organization listings,» «Messengers,» or set up as individual placements manually.

The Yandex Advertising Network (YAN) is a system for placing ads on Yandex’s services and partner placements. Unlike search, an ad here isn’t shown in response to a query: placements are picked by page topic, or by the user’s interests and behavior. You can’t choose placements yourself, but you can exclude unwanted ones in the campaign settings. People in search and in the network are in different situations, so it’s better to evaluate the results of these placements separately. Detailed setup of impressions in the network is a topic for a separate breakdown.

Step 5. Pick keyword phrases and negative keyword phrases

A keyword phrase determines which queries an ad can show for in search. Direct shows the ad for queries that are semantically related to the keyword phrase.

The help documentation recommends picking phrases closely related to your products and services, accounting for synonyms, professional terms, typos, and writing foreign names in both Latin and Cyrillic script. How to gather such phrasings from search data is covered in the article on how to find the phrasings people use to search for your product. It’s also worth separating queries where a person is ready to buy from queries where they’re only exploring the topic. More on how to tell a query with buying intent from a question-style query in a separate material.

Phrases with different meanings are easier to manage if split across different groups. Then the ad in a group answers exactly those queries, and the statistics show which direction is working.

Autotargeting is a display technology that doesn’t use keyword phrases: Direct analyzes the ad and the landing page and determines whether the ad fits the query. Autotargeting queries are divided into categories: priority, narrow, broad, alternative and related. You can limit autotargeting by choosing categories and with negative keyword phrases. The help documentation advises disabling a category only if it’s underperforming. Autotargeting impression statistics are tracked separately — check them after launch.

Negative keywords and negative keyword phrases are words and phrases for whose queries the ad won’t show. Negative keywords are added to a specific keyword phrase, negative keyword phrases to an ad group or the whole campaign. For example, if you sell new furniture, queries with the word «used» usually aren’t what you need. At the start it’s enough to exclude obviously off-target words; systematic work with negative keyword phrases is a separate topic.

Operators help you phrase a keyword phrase or negative keyword phrase more precisely:

• «!» fixes the word form: number, case, tense;
• quotation marks fix the number of words;
• «+» fixes stop words — function parts of speech and pronouns;
• square brackets fix word order.

Step 6. Write your ads

An ad should answer the query and lead to a page where the promise is kept. Direct’s help documentation warns: information in the ad must be accurate and confirmed on the site, or the person, not finding what was promised, will leave.

The help documentation lists these ad elements: title and text, images, video, a carousel, an action button, prices, sitelinks, a display link, callouts, data from external sources, a promotion, delivery. You don’t need to fill in all of them, but extra elements give the person more information even before the click.

As of the check date, these limits apply: the title is 56 characters including spaces and punctuation, the text is 81 characters and 15 punctuation marks. The text may be truncated depending on the placement.

What to write: the help documentation advises describing the offer’s advantages and adding a call to action. It’s good to have several ad variants in a group: groups let you test variants and automatically determine which one is more appealing to the audience.

On links. Direct automatically adds a yclid tag with a unique click number to every landing link in your ads. If you’re also analyzing traffic in other systems, you can add UTM tags and dynamic parameters in a UPC.

Step 7. Find out where the ads will show in search

On the search results page, ads have several types of placements. You don’t choose or buy a placement separately, so it’s useful to understand what each option looks like.

• Premium impressions (Special placement) — the block above the search results.
• Other impressions — ads that didn’t make the premium block may show in the middle or at the bottom of the page.
• Dynamic search placements — additional ad placements inside the organic results.
• Search banner — pay-per-click display advertising to the right of the search results; only one such banner shows per page.

Dynamic placements. In a UPC, these are controlled by the «Promotion in search results» and «Dynamic search placements» settings: in new campaigns these options are already selected. In Campaign Builder, Product Campaign and Easy Start, this placement is used by default. Payment is only for additional clicks and conversions: the baseline traffic from organic results that the page would have received anyway stays free. As of the check date, the format is in beta testing: such ads are seen only by users whose location is detected as Russia. Results can be viewed in a separate «Dynamic search placements» report on the «Overview» page.

Search banner. This is a separate campaign type; in Direct Pro’s list of types it’s called «Search context banner.» The banner is shown according to the user’s query. For a first campaign it usually isn’t needed: this format is worth considering once your main search campaign is already producing data.

Step 8. Pass moderation, top up your balance and launch the campaign

Moderation is a check of the ad before it shows. The text, keyword phrases and links are checked, along with the landing pages and sitelinks. Ads must comply with the requirements of the countries they’ll show in, and some topics require documents.

The moderator’s decision shows up in the campaign status, and problems are reported by email. If an ad is rejected, fix the error in Direct’s interface and resubmit it for moderation. If you can’t find the error, contact customer support. Failing moderation is one of the reasons an ad doesn’t show.

Payment. To pay for ads, you top up a shared account — a single source of funds for all campaigns under one login. The «Top up» button is on the campaigns page under the login. The minimum payment amount is listed in the payment help documentation, and all monetary figures in the account are shown excluding VAT. If there’s no money in the shared account or the campaign account, there will be no impressions.

Labeling. Yandex, as the ad data operator, issues tokens for every creative before placement in Direct. If you’re running the ads yourself, you need to enter your own details in the account as the end advertiser; Yandex handles the rest itself.

Before launch, go through a short checklist:

• the Metrica tracking tag is specified in the campaign, and the goals fire;
• the region and schedule match when and where you’re ready to take inquiries;
• each group has closely related phrases and ads that match them;
• obviously off-target words have been added as negative keyword phrases;
• links go to the right pages, and the pages open;
• the advertiser’s labeling data is filled in, and the account is funded.

Step 9. What to check in the first days after launch

After launch, the main task is to make sure the ad shows for the right queries and that clicks reach the goals.

The «Search queries» report helps you analyze the queries your ads were shown for. You can open it from the «Report Library,» «Placement optimization» section, or from the campaign list. Off-target queries can be added right away to negative keyword phrases with the «Add to negative keyword phrases» button, and good ones to keyword phrases. The report also shows autotargeting impressions.

Report Wizard is a tool for viewing statistics that lets you analyze campaign performance and get detailed information about how they’re running. You open it through «Statistics» → «Report Wizard,» and also from the campaign list. Data can be grouped, for example, by placement, by impression condition type, or by ad number. That way you can see what’s working better: search or the network, keyword phrases or autotargeting, one ad or another. For routine tasks there’s a Report Library with ready-made reports.

Metrica. Watch how many goals are reached through ad traffic. Clicks show interest, while goals show whether that interest turns into inquiries.

Don’t change everything at once. You can remove obviously off-target queries from the first days. But it’s better not to overhaul the strategy, goals and budget every day, or it becomes harder for the system to build a forecast (see step 3).

Common mistakes in self-service setup

Self-service setup of Yandex Direct more often breaks down on decisions than on buttons. Typical mistakes:

1. Launching without goals. Without configured goals, the «Maximum conversions» strategy is unavailable, and you’re judging the ad by eye.
2. All queries in one group. An ad can’t answer different queries equally well, and the statistics all blend together.
3. Uncontrolled autotargeting. It works without keyword phrases; if you don’t watch its categories and the queries report, part of the budget may go to irrelevant impressions.
4. No negative keyword phrases. Off-target queries visible in the «Search queries» report just keep showing up in impressions.
5. The ad promises something that isn’t on the page. The help documentation says plainly that in this case the person will leave the site.
6. Search and the network evaluated together. Impressions in search and in the Yandex Advertising Network work differently, and a combined total hides which placement is working.
7. Judging by clicks instead of inquiries. Cheap clicks with no inquiries don’t solve the business’s task.
8. Frequent strategy edits. The help documentation warns that frequent restarts with different settings make the forecast worse.

When to hand setup off to a specialist

This guide lets you launch your first campaign yourself. But there are situations where your own resources might not be enough:

• there’s no time to regularly check reports, clean up queries and review results;
• sales happen off-site, and they need to be tied back to the ads;
• there are many campaigns and lines of business, and they start overlapping on queries;
• you need to explain results to management in the language of data, not impressions.

In such cases it’s worth looking at what managing ads with change reports involves, and deciding what to keep in-house and what to hand off.

FAQ

Can you set up Yandex Direct for free?

If you set it up yourself, there’s no one to pay for the setup itself: your costs are time and the ad budget. Money is charged for results under the chosen model — for example, for clicks, or, in the «Maximum conversions» strategy, for conversions. For the ad to show, there needs to be money in the account.

How much money do you need to get started?

There’s no universal figure: spend depends on competition, the region, the strategy, and how much data you want to gather. The minimum payment amount is listed in Direct’s payment help documentation and can change. It’s better to set the test amount in advance and not exceed it until you’ve worked through the first results.

Do you need a site to advertise in Direct?

Not necessarily. In Campaign Builder you can describe the business in a couple of sentences if there’s no site, or promote a Telegram channel and products on a marketplace. In Easy Start, without a site, you fill in a questionnaire about the business. And with the «Continue without a site» option, Direct creates an online business card. But the Metrica goals from step 1 are set up on a site with a tracking tag.

Why isn’t the ad showing after launch?

Direct’s help documentation names many reasons. The most common ones for a new campaign: no money in the account, the ad failed moderation, bids or budget are too low, impressions are paused by the time-targeting schedule, the campaign was stopped manually. Another reason — the keyword phrase contains the name of a region that isn’t included in the impression regions.

How can you tell if the ad is paying off?

Count inquiries and their cost, not clicks: how much was spent in Direct and how many goals were reached in Metrica. Then compare the cost of an inquiry to how much you earn from a client. If sales happen off-site, you’ll need to tie them back to the ads separately.