How to judge a Russian ads contractor before you pay

Choosing an advertising contractor is hard everywhere, because almost everyone says the same correct words in the first meeting. Choosing one in Russia when you do not read Russian is harder, because the usual verification routes are closed to you. You cannot skim their blog and judge the thinking. You cannot call three former clients and follow the conversation. You cannot read the ad copy they wrote and tell whether it is any good.

What you can still do is check how the person works, and that turns out to be more informative than any of the above. Three checks in particular reveal the level before you have spent a budget: how they report, how they handle case studies, and how wide they see your task.

A note on the frame. All of this is written from the position of an owner or a director who pays for advertising and wants to understand what for. Not to nitpick, but to tell apart the person who closes a technical task from the person who helps the business earn.

A report you cannot understand is not a report

Start with reporting. It is the most honest indicator available, and the one you can evaluate without a word of Russian.

The typical weak report looks like this: channel name, total spend, total inquiries for the period, a trend chart. That is all. Neat, short, useless.

The problem is that no structure is visible behind that summary. The business has several directions, the advertising has dozens or hundreds of campaigns, and the report gives one line for the whole channel. You cannot see which direction brings inquiries and which merely eats budget. A separate plague is charts with unlabelled axes: a line goes somewhere, and over what period and what exactly changed cannot be determined. The report formally exists and gives control to nobody, including the contractor.

A good report has to give you cuts: by direction, by campaign, by segment, with correctly labelled axes. Then you can see where the money goes and how each segment performs. The test is simple. Open the report and ask whether you could decide from it what to strengthen and what to switch off. If you cannot, the report is decorative.

There is an opposite extreme worth naming honestly. Splitting advertising into hundreds of micro-campaigns for the sake of detail is also harmful: data gets smeared thin, the algorithms have nothing to learn on, and the report turns into an unreadable bedsheet. Automated bidding in Yandex Direct learns on conversion data, and a fragmented account starves it. A good contractor groups segments into meaningful cuts rather than dumping a raw list on you. Reasonable detail is the middle between one line and a thousand.

For a foreign client add one more requirement to this list, and put it in the contract: the reporting language and the currency. Reports that arrive in Russian and get machine-translated in the head office lose exactly the nuance you were paying for. Agree this before the first invoice.

“Show us case studies” is the right question with the wrong expectation

Nearly every client asks to see case studies, and that is normal. What is not normal is expecting the figures in someone else’s case to repeat for you. They will not, and here is why.

Behind the same word “result” sit different conditions. A different niche. A different region with different purchasing power, which inside Russia varies more than most foreign buyers expect: Moscow, a million-plus regional city and a town of two hundred thousand are three different auctions with three different price levels. A different budget. A different season. A different service mix: a similar business may not offer half of what was in the case. A different market era, which in Russia means something sharper than elsewhere, because the available platforms changed substantially within the last few years. Ask the author of a case study from before that shift to repeat it today and the answer clarifies things quickly.

And the main thing: primary metrics like cost per click and cost per lead say nothing about what happens afterwards. Nothing about conversion into a sale, the length of the deal cycle, the average order value, the margin. Even a complete copy of someone else’s advertising and someone else’s site will not produce the same sales, because your internal numbers are different. Cases also routinely hide that the business had been receiving a large share of its inquiries through brand recognition and direct visits for years, and without that almost free underlay the averages look several times worse.

Does that make case studies useless? No. A case is legitimate as an illustration of approach and of the logic behind decisions, not as a promise of specific numbers.

Which is why a strong specialist, asked for case studies, does not dump screenshots. They ask a question back: what do you want to see in them and why. Behind the request there is almost always a specific doubt. You want the same niche, and that is answered by experience in adjacent ones. You want the same region, and that is answered by experience in regions of comparable size and competition. You want proof of expertise, and that is given by analysis and methodology rather than pictures with numbers.

A specialist who turns the conversation from other people’s metrics toward the conditions of your project understands how results are produced. That is a good sign, and you can read it through an interpreter.

A technician, or someone who sees the whole path

The third check matters most, because it is about role.

There is the technician contractor: they close one technical task, the campaigns are set up and running, everything else is not mine. And there is the person who gives feedback on the whole promotion process: they see the path from your current state to the goal and understand that advertising is only part of that path.

The difference shows up in the very first negotiation. With a technician you discuss one channel: bids, keywords, ads. With someone who thinks wider, the conversation becomes a scenario: how to get from A to B faster and with fewer wasted expenses. They build a causal chain, this action to get this result which opens the next step. That is not a guarantee of an outcome. It is coherence of thinking, and it is visible immediately.

An important qualifier, so there are no illusions. A wide role does not mean the person does everything with their own hands. Creative production, site development, SEO get delegated to specialists, leaving the scenario and the advertising with them. The value is not that one person carries it all. It is that they hold the whole picture and answer for the connections between its parts. That is exactly why entrepreneurs more often choose this kind of contractor: you do not have to stitch disconnected performers into a single logic yourself.

For a company entering Russia the stitching problem is the whole problem. You will otherwise be coordinating a Russian ads agency, a translation vendor, a web developer in your home country and a local sales hire, none of whom are responsible for whether the chain works end to end. That gap is where market entries die, and it is the reason entering the Russian market is a strategy question before it is a channel question.

One more marker of wide thinking worth watching for: does the person understand that different channels solve different tasks. That targeted social advertising belongs where demand still has to be created, and search belongs where demand already exists and has to be captured. That a channel is chosen by the state of demand rather than by habit or fashion. If a contractor pulls you toward one channel regardless of your situation, they are selling their instrument rather than solving your task.

How to check a contractor in one conversation

A short set of questions and observations that clarifies a great deal:

• Ask for a typical report. Then ask yourself whether you could decide from it what to strengthen and what to switch off. If not, it is decorative. Agree the language and currency of reporting at the same time.
• Watch the reaction to a request for case studies. A strong specialist clarifies what exactly you want to see rather than burying you in other people’s figures as a promise.
• Listen for the path, not the buttons. A good contractor talks about the scenario from your state to your goal, not only about bids and keywords.
• Ask about channels. If they explain why this particular channel suits your situation rather than pulling everyone into the same one, they are thinking about your task.
• Look for honesty about responsibility. Many factors influence a business result, and a reasonable person says so out loud instead of promising guaranteed sales.

Advertising is a trust service: you hand over money for work you cannot always supervise directly. That is doubly true across a language barrier. So how the person thinks and how they talk to you matters more than any case study.

A technician will report a beautiful click-through rate. A partner will tell you what is happening to your money and what to do next.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Yandex Direct help, statistics and reporting: yandex.com/support/direct/en/statistics
• Yandex Metrica help, attribution models: yandex.com/support/metrica/general/attribution
• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Отчёт, кейсы, доверие: как оценить подрядчика по рекламе