Display problems

An ad that has passed moderation is usually not served because:

No money on the shared account or campaign account

Check the balance on your shared account or campaign account.

Perhaps your account ran low or ran out, although the statistics doesn't show any spending. The report statistics and account balance are updated at different times, and the values might differ for an active campaign, especially if the campaign spending is high.

Statistics in different Yandex Direct reports are also updated at different times. Report Wizard provides the most up-to-date information.

Hence when you viewed the statistics, you could had already spent the money, but the data on impressions, clicks, and costs hadn't been updated in the reports yet.

Before starting to analyze costs using reports, be sure that the data is up-to-date: the data update time is shown in the lower-left corner of the report (Updated label).

Activation is not complete

If you changed settings for your campaign, strategy, or ads, impressions will follow previous settings during the activation period: the system needs some time to apply the changes. Activation can take up to 180 minutes, see clause 3.12.1 of the Ad serving rules.

Activation also starts after money is credited to the account if the balance was zero and the campaign was inactive.

Here are some causes for activation to begin:

• Paying an invoice at zero balance.

• Enabling a campaign or individual ad.

• Changing the campaign settings, ad group settings, or strategy.

  Changing these settings may affect impressions:

  • Start date: If the start date was set to a later date, and you set the current date.
  • Impression schedule: If there were no impressions at the checked time before, but now there should be impressions.
  • Display regions: If you enabled new regions and are testing ad impressions in one of the regions.
  • Strategy: If the impressions were disabled on search, but now you have enabled them.
• Passing moderation.

  If you changed the ad, the search results will show the new version only after moderation is successful and activation is complete (up to 180 minutes under clause 3.12.1 of the Ad serving rules).

  The activation process begins after the ads are checked and approved.

  Any ads that are stopped or belong to a stopped campaign are only sent for activation after they are enabled. For example, if the campaign was moderated at 12:00, but the ads were enabled at 13:00, the activation time must be counted from the time the ads were enabled.

• Stopping or resuming impressions using site availability monitoring.

If you made such changes over the past 180 minutes, wait until activation is complete.

Bids are too low

Impressions on the first page might not run if you manually set bids for keywords at a level below the minimum CPC (the “Manual bid management” strategy is running) or the system set bids that low when running automatic strategies (see clause 3.10.1 of the Ad serving rules).

You can check if the ads are served on other pages. To do this, go to the search section with the number of results and click Show all (next to the Place ad link). This will open the page with all the ads shown for the query.

The ratio of your daily budget or account balance to the bids is too low.

Evaluate the ratio of your daily budget or account balance to the bids. If they are used up in only a few clicks, impressions might be unstable.

It's better to increase your budget or decrease your bids.

The ad failed moderation or passed it partially

The ad won't be served until it fully passes moderation.

If you made changes to an ad and it was submitted for moderation, but didn't pass moderation completely yet, then the old version of the ad is displayed (even if you can see the new ad version in the interface).

Until the new version of the ad fully passes moderation and activation is complete (up to 180 minutes under clause 3.12.1 of the Ad serving rules), the previous version is served, and the Yandex Direct interface shows the warning under the ad or group: “Previous version of the ad is running”.

The ad is stopped by site availability monitoring

Site monitoring tracks the site availability by only requesting its home page. Ads are suspended if the site is unavailable for at least 15 minutes or more. Impressions resume automatically when the site is back online.

The home page is monitored several times a day automatically. The frequency of checks depends on the site traffic. You can't manually specify their exact number or timing.

If the site is unavailable during the check, it's not disabled until the bot returns to the page to make the second check. If the site is still unavailable at that time, impressions are stopped.

After the ad is disabled, site monitoring continues. If the site becomes available at a future check, impressions resume.

If your site becomes available but impressions are not resumed, please wait: the bot will crawl the site and resume impressions.

If the site is back online for a while already, but the bot doesn't resume impressions, you can disable monitoring in the campaign settings.

If you suspect that site availability monitoring made the wrong decision, namely, stopped impressions when the site was available or didn't resume impressions when the site became available, contact the customer service department using the feedback form, and we'll check our monitoring. Attach the Access logs of your site's response to the Yandex bot. The bot's useragent is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexMetrika/2.0; +http://yandex.com/bots yabs01). This information is needed so our technical experts can discover the causes of the situation.

What are Access logs

Access logs are text files used by web servers to record the site access requests. One server request is recorded per line in the file.

Logs are used to collect the site statistics and detect possible site abuses.

To get this information, please contact your webmaster.

Impressions were suspended by the daily or weekly budget settings

Check if the campaign has any warnings:

• “Your weekly budget has temporarily suspended impressions for this ad”
• “Impressions paused by daily budget restrictions”
• “Impressions suspended by shared account daily budget limit”

If you see these warnings, change your campaign budget settings to resume impressions.

You stopped the campaign or ad manually

Check the status of your campaigns and ads. You may have manually stopped the campaign or ad, which is why the ad is not served. Click Resume impressions.

Ads in the campaign are stopped by moderators

Check the status of the ads on the campaign page. Some or all of your ads might be on the Stopped tab. According to clause 3.5.8. of the Yandex Direct service offer, the bot may stop the ads while they are being moderated.

After the ads are approved by moderators, they remain on the Stopped tab until you manually resume impressions.

Campaign impressions are suspended according to the time targeting schedule

Check the time targeting schedule based on the time zone you selected in the campaign settings. To do this, go to the Edit campaign page and expand Impression schedule.

A later date of campaign start is entered

Check the campaign start date in the settings and change it if necessary.

The ad is found similar to others

If a keyword has a bid sufficient for serving on the first page, but you can't find your ad in the search results for the query, your ad might be similar to another ad (see clause 3.11 in the Ad serving rules).

Ads from the same or different advertisers can be recognized as similar if, at the same time:

• They promote the same or similar products and services advertised and sold in the same region.
• They are placed with the same or overlapping keywords.
• They contain links to the same or similar advertiser sites.

If your ad is found similar to others, it might not be shown. The search results show the ad that has the best combination of click-through rate (CTR), quality coefficient, and bid per click.

If you suspect that your ad was found to be similar to other ads, you can check it by sending a request to the customer service department using the feedback form.

Campaign has many invalid clicks

Yandex Direct protects ads from fake clicks. Those clicks that are identified as invalid at the first stage of checking (online filtering) are filtered automatically. You don't pay for them.

Campaign statistics are always double checked (offline filtering): the system analyzes the clicks previously counted in the campaign statistics after the online filtering. Some clicks may also be filtered as a result of the second check. You can view the number of clicks filtered by the anti-fraud system over a certain period in Report wizard (Invalid clicks) row.

If any invalid clicks are found at the second check, you get refunded for them. You'll be notified about this at the email address specified in the campaign settings.

Clicks are analyzed for a large number of parameters, so the decision about their integrity is made with a small delay. While checking validity, the system "reserves" the amount equal to the cost of the click that is being checked. Yandex Direct interface shows no debit transaction at this point.

In the case of fraudulent activities, the number of "bad" clicks can be many times higher than "good" clicks. Therefore, at some points the total "reserved" amount reaches the campaign's account balance. At this point, the system decides that the account ran out of money and stops impressions. After all the fraudulent clicks are checked and invalidated, the money is released and impressions resume.

Open Report Wizard and estimate the number of registered and filtered clicks for a given day. If the number of filtered clicks is much higher than the number of counted clicks, evaluate the expected cost of those clicks. To do this, multiply the number of filtered clicks by the average CPC. Compare the balance on your campaign account or shared account with the expected spending on filtered clicks.

To minimize the number of stops due to invalid clicks, try to reduce the bid or top up your campaign account with a higher amount (you may also set a higher limit for the shared account daily budget, if any). This way you can ensure that you have enough balance to continue impressions in case of temporarily reserved money.