How to Set Up Yandex Direct Ads: A Beginner's Guide

The short answer: launch order

1. Install Yandex Metrica on your site and set up goals (lead, call, purchase).
2. Create a Yandex Direct account with a Yandex ID and choose your country and currency.
3. Create a Unified Performance Campaign (UPC): search and the Yandex Advertising Network (YAN) in one campaign.
4. Link your Metrica tag and choose the goals to optimize for.
5. Set location, keywords, negative keywords, ads and a bidding strategy.
6. Top up the balance and submit the campaign for moderation.

Step 1. Account and preparation

• Sign in to Direct with a company Yandex ID, not an employee's personal email: access is easier to hand over later.
• The currency is chosen when the account is created and cannot be changed afterwards, so decide in advance which currency suits payments and reporting.
• Payment methods and paperwork depend on the advertiser's country — check the available options in the interface before launch.
• If a contractor runs your ads, grant them representative access instead of sharing a login and password.

Step 2. UPC or simplified settings

A UPC can run on both search and the network, or on just one of them. A common practice is to split search and network into separate campaigns: they have different click costs, different user intent and need different ads.

Step 3. Search and network

Search shows ads to people who are looking for your product right now. What matters here:

• keywords — research them in Wordstat filtered by your target region;
• negative keywords — cut irrelevant queries such as "free", "download", "jobs";
• match operators: "quotes" fix the number of words, ! fixes the word form, + fixes function words, [] fixes word order.

YAN shows ads on partner websites and apps. Banners and text-and-image ads work here, and keywords act more as a hint for finding the audience. On the network, images and placement cleanup matter more: regularly exclude sites and apps that deliver clicks without conversions.

Step 4. Linking Metrica

Without Metrica, Direct does not know which clicks turned into leads. In the campaign settings:

• enter your Metrica tag number;
• choose goals for optimization — one or two main ones, not everything at once;
• keep link tagging for Metrica enabled so visits are correctly matched to clicks;
• for pay-per-conversion strategies, make sure the goal fires reliably and without duplicates.

Test your goals before launch: submit a test lead and confirm the conversion shows up in Metrica reports.

Step 5. Location: Uzbekistan and CIS

• Choose where ads are shown: the whole country, specific cities (such as Tashkent) or several countries.
• Extended geo-targeting shows ads to people elsewhere if their query mentions your region. For local services this may be unnecessary — check the setting.
• For several countries, use separate campaigns: budgets, ad language and bids are easier to manage that way.
• Consider your audience's language: in Uzbekistan it makes sense to check demand in both Russian and Uzbek and prepare ads for each.
• Assess Yandex's share among your audience: in Uzbekistan a large part of search goes through Google, so Direct is often combined with Google Ads.

Common mistakes

• Launching without Metrica goals and optimizing for clicks.
• Search and network running identical ads with mixed statistics.
• No negative keywords, so budget goes to irrelevant queries.
• Too many goals in optimization, so the algorithm learns from minor actions.
• Daily strategy edits that disrupt learning.