Yandex Direct Campaigns Built and Run in Russian

The first question is which legal entity signs and pays, and it is faster to answer in week one than in week six. For an advertiser based in the EU, Yandex Direct is a contracting and payments question before it is an advertising question, and we will not begin a build until your counsel has confirmed both the route and the category. We have declined this work twice on that basis and expect to again. The second refusal is translated ad copy. Direct's two-title structure is not a Google headline set, Russian query behaviour is not English query behaviour rendered in Cyrillic, and an ad machine-translated from an English original reads to a Russian buyer exactly as a machine-translated English ad reads to you. Copy is written in Russian by a native writer who has used the product. If your landing page is itself machine-translated, we will say the account cannot work and stop there rather than take the build fee. How the account is built: Search and network are separate campaigns from day one. Combining them to save administration is the standard way a search budget disappears into the network. Metrica goes on first, with goals defined in Metrica rather than inferred from GA4, and ecommerce data pushed through the dataLayer wherever there is a basket. Autotargeting arrives switched on and cannot be fully removed in several campaign types, so it is constrained with category exclusions and negative lists rather than wished away. We do not use Master of Campaigns on accounts of this size: it hides the queries and placements we are being paid to look at. The network, honestly: Most Direct budgets are lost in the advertising network, and most of that happens in mobile in-app inventory. App placements are excluded at launch and re-admitted only where a specific placement has earned it on your own conversion data. Placement exclusions are reviewed weekly. The list turns over faster than a monthly cadence can catch, which is why monthly network reviews always read like a report on last month's problem. Measurement: Metrica goals for the immediate signal, and offline conversion upload through the Direct API for the outcome that matters, keyed on ClientID. Payment for conversions is a good instrument and a poor launch setting: it needs a goal already receiving roughly twenty conversions a week, or the campaign starves itself and you conclude the market does not work. We migrate to it once that volume exists, and we will not put it in a launch plan to make the plan look efficient. Latency and pages: A site hosted in Frankfurt behind a network with no Russian presence loads slowly enough on a Russian mobile connection to lose a real share of clicks you have already paid for. We measure this before launch, from inside the market. Where the page is slow and the site cannot move, we build Turbo pages for the campaigns that need them and treat that as a stopgap rather than an architecture. Not included: VK Ads, Telegram Ads, Ozon and Wildberries advertising, and marketplace operations generally. Site translation and localisation beyond ad copy. Legal advice: we will tell you what the platform requires and what we have seen happen, and your counsel decides what you do with it. Who this is not for: Categories requiring documents you do not hold, or restricted for your entity. Advertisers who want the same creative as their English account, translated. And anyone who wants Direct opened quickly and quietly, because the slow parts of this are the parts that keep the account alive.