Where a store’s spend stays in the account: live shoppers with no interest, a repeat Thank-you page, a bad contact and a form filled for a bonus. What has already returned to the shared balance.
Four persistent myths: a live person with no interest, a click spike, the Invalid clicks column, and the promise that a check catches everything.
What to do when clicks look like competitors: what Direct returns to the balance, what to send support, and why the Russian competition law does not name click fraud.
In Yandex Direct, clicks from people who are paid to complete a task count as fraud. A form sent for a reward you offered on your own site is not invalid traffic.
A kind of bot is the program's purpose. The guides name indexing, an availability check and a click on an ad. A person paid to click is not on that list.
An invalid click is one Yandex Direct already removed from the reports and left off the bill. A suspicious visit from a real person does not land in that row.
The figure of 5.8 billion dollars is a 2019 forecast for display and video, and it leaves search out. A 2023 US benchmark is about 1% IVT. Neither number is a Yandex Direct campaign’s loss.
In the 2020 MRC standard, IVT is the name for invalid traffic as a whole. GIVT is caught by routine checks. SIVT is not. Direct’s GIVT share is a separate row for reach campaigns.
The published text of Russia’s competition law and Criminal Code articles 272 and 273 does not name click fraud. Those sections neither punish a competitor nor say the clicks are allowed.
Yandex Direct’s help does not publish two fraud rates, one for search and one for networks. It does say which placements you can block, and when a display click is counted.
In most cases Yandex Direct returns spend on traffic it has already classed as invalid, and it does that automatically. A support letter returns money only when the suspicion is confirmed.
One sign cannot separate a bot from a person. Yandex Metrica counts both masking programs and some JavaScript-free visits as robots, and it does not publish the behavior rules.
An empty click comes from software, a person paid to click, a competitor, or an accident. The report shows a trace, not a name, and you pay for what the filter missed.
Click fraud and скликивание are two names for one empty click. An invalid click in the ad account is different: the platform already took it off the bill.
Click fraud is a click you still pay for even though the person was not a buyer. A click the ad platform already marked invalid and did not charge is not part of that loss.