Yandex Direct account audit, part 1: where to look first

When you inherit someone else’s advertising account, the urge is to open the keywords and bids and start improving. That is a mistake of order. The first look should be wide: first understand the scale of the project, then check whether ads are serving at all, and only then take the details apart, without mistaking someone else’s inheritance for your own errors.

An audit is not a hunt for someone to blame, and it is not cosmetics. It is a diagnosis: where the system stands still, where it leaks, why it behaves strangely. For a company that advertises in Russia from another country, the diagnosis matters more than usual. The account was set up by a contractor you may never have met. The interface is in Russian. The person paying for the clicks rarely opens the settings. Under those conditions, a week spent on details while the root cause sits in plain view is the normal outcome, not the exception.

Here is where to look first, in the order that saves that week.

Scale first, then details

Before any setting, collect the basic facts. Otherwise you will discover them along the way and redo the work. Three blocks to fill in at once:

• Scale. Monthly budget. Number of channels and campaign types. How many sites and subdomains carry the traffic. Which regions are targeted. How many advertising accounts and branches exist.
• Volume and quality of data. How many clicks and conversions have accumulated. How fast the statistics grow. How long the advertising has been running at all. The size of the keyword set, the number of unique queries and unique words when you break phrases down word by word.
• Environment. Whether the site and the competitors have ever been audited. How many pages are actually used in the ads. Whether the site competes with aggregators, marketplaces and the search engine’s own built-in services. What kind of business it is: business-to-business, consumer, services, manufacturing, franchise.

These answers show the size of the job immediately. A large keyword set, a dozen regions and a dirty history need a completely different approach from a compact single-product project with clean statistics.

For a foreign company there is a fourth block that Russian projects can usually skip: access. In Russia it is common for an advertiser’s campaigns to live inside the agency’s own Yandex Direct account rather than the client’s. When the contractor changes, the client sometimes discovers that the account, the statistics and the Yandex Metrica counter all belong to someone else. Before you audit anything, establish who owns the login, who owns the counter, and whether the history can be transferred at all.

Separately, fix the commercial terms. Decide whether the initial diagnosis is part of a free consultation or paid work. This is about the client’s expectations and about the economics of your own time.

Why the campaign is not serving

The most common reason for a call: few impressions, or none. Here you do not guess. You walk a list.

Budget and limits. Is the daily limit on the account too small? Is there enough balance left? Is the balance kept near zero by frequent small top-ups? Does the limit cover more than a couple of clicks at the current click price? For a company paying from abroad, add one more question: has the payment actually cleared? Cross-border payment into Yandex Direct usually runs through an intermediary, and a campaign that “stopped for no reason” often stopped because the money is still in transit.

Also check whether a campaign built with the Campaign Wizard is running alongside the manual campaigns. The wizard is Yandex’s simplified format, and it competes for the same auctions. It can pull traffic away from the campaigns you are trying to diagnose.

Keywords and targeting. What is the real frequency of the keywords once negatives are applied? Which region is set on the group? Are targeting conditions overlapping so that reach narrows more than intended? Do any negative keywords conflict with the phrases, so that a negative cancels a query you actually want? The last one is more common in Russian than in English: word forms change with case and number, and a negative added to block one meaning can quietly block another.

Moderation and statuses. Is the campaign still under review? In Yandex Direct, activation can take days, and the queue is longer when advertising law requires the ad to carry a marking identifier. How many ads and phrases were rejected? How many groups sit in the “few impressions” status, which switches off serving for low-frequency phrases entirely? Have impressions been suspended for a policy violation? What is the average position? A low position is a bidding question, not a reason for zero impressions.

Networks and reach. Is the Yandex Advertising Network switched on in a campaign that was meant to be search only? That is a budget drain that looks like activity. Is there no cap on the click price, so that the account overpays several times over? Are there excessive exclusions at the campaign level or in the shared library that block reach?

Most cases of “the campaign is not serving” are one of these standard causes, not a platform failure. The list takes an hour to walk.

The inheritance that looks like your mistake

Some objects in an advertising account live above the campaign. In Google Ads this is the classic trap with extensions attached at the account level: they keep showing in every campaign, including the ones a new team builds later for a different product, long after the old contractor’s campaigns have been paused or deleted.

Yandex Direct has the same architecture under a different name. The shared library holds negative keyword sets, retargeting segments, audience conditions and other objects that campaigns reference rather than own. A negative set that the previous team attached to every campaign will attach itself, by habit or by template, to the new ones. A retargeting segment built on a Metrica goal that no longer exists will still sit as a condition. From the outside it looks like a crude setup error. In fact it is the level structure of the platform, which not everyone who works through the interface without deep immersion knows about.

What to do. Open the shared library. Check every object type and the level at which each is attached. Pause the account-level objects that do not relate to the current offer. Pausing preserves accumulated statistics; recreating resets them. Recreate what is needed, precisely, at the level of the specific campaigns.

Check all objects, and go past the obvious ones. What was added, and at what level, especially if the account was previously run by another team. Even a careful specialist who sets up new campaigns cleanly can easily miss inherited attachments. This is a systemic error of project handover, not a one-off oversight, and it is the reason a foreign company should insist on a written inventory of the account at the moment of handover, in a language the client can read.

When an “irrelevant” ad is not a mistake

A separate plot in every audit: the ad showed for a query that, on the face of it, has nothing to do with the product. Before writing “the specialist messed up”, recall the platform mechanics.

Autotargeting. In Yandex Direct this is switched on by default in new groups, and since 2023 it cannot be fully removed from text campaigns, only narrowed by category. It matches ads to a huge range of related queries, the way broad match does in Google. Where Google lets you avoid broad match altogether, Yandex makes the audit question different: which autotargeting categories are enabled, and are the negatives keeping them honest? Wide matching is usually the last scaling tool, reached for when other methods are exhausted, not a sign of incompetence.

Extended geotargeting. Yandex shows ads to people who are interested in a region even when they are not located in it and the query carries no place name. To get the place name into the ad text, you need dynamic insertion, which not everyone configures, and its absence looks like irrelevance.

Search retargeting. The user belongs to a warm audience for which bids were raised on near-target and competitor keywords. In Russia these segments come from Yandex Metrica and from Yandex Audiences, and they can be shared between accounts. An audience built by one advertiser becomes a target for another in an adjacent niche, and the resulting impression looks unrelated to the query.

Geography of small towns. A small town next to a large city can be conditionally assigned to the city by the search engine, and the campaign partly captures neighbouring traffic. Russian regions are large and the settlement structure is uneven, so this effect shows up more often than a European media planner expects.

The conclusion: part of the visible irrelevance is not a setup error. It is the platform’s own mechanisms at work. You need to know them in advance so that you can plan for them, rather than dissecting them afterwards as defects.

Where to start the audit this week

• Measure the scale. Collect budget, regions, accounts, and the volume and quality of history before going into keywords. If you are abroad, add ownership of the account and the Metrica counter to the list.
• Check serving in order. Walk through budget and limits, keywords, moderation and networks before blaming the configuration. Confirm the payment actually arrived.
• Find the inheritance. Check the shared library and every account-level object. Pause what was inherited and does not belong to the current offer.
• Do not rush the verdict. Separate platform mechanics from real errors: autotargeting, extended geotargeting, search retargeting, small-town geography.
• Fix the terms. Decide whether the diagnosis is part of a free consultation before the work begins.

An audit does not start with keywords. It starts with a map: the scale, whether ads are serving, what here is someone else’s inheritance, and what is the platform itself. Whoever goes into the details first fixes symptoms and spends months not seeing the root cause lying in plain sight. A wide first look saves weeks, and it saves you from taking someone else’s handwriting for your own mistake. The second part goes deeper into the technical checklist.

If you want to know where your account leaks and what to fix first, come for a free review: I will walk through it in exactly this order. And for how a paid traffic system is built as a whole, see the Yandex Ads page.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Аудит аккаунта, часть 1: где смотреть первым делом