What CPC is and what the click price depends on

CPC is the click price actually charged under the auction rules. The Yandex Direct glossary names it that way, and the auction help says you pay for clicks, the price is not fixed, and the auction sets it. Bids are entered in currency, the auction runs in Direct’s internal units, and conversion uses the Central Bank of Russia rate for the current date. The auction runs while the user loads a search page or a page with Yandex Advertising Network and external-network blocks. The auction page does not publish a “normal CPC.”

Next to the click price people often look at CTR: in the glossary it is the ratio of clicks to impressions, in percent, and the glossary ties it to ad effectiveness. The page does not set a normal CTR. Below is what decides a place in the block, how the average price differs from the bid, and why a network price does not rewrite the search price.

Place in the block and two charging formulas

Ads are ranked by a combination of the bid, the quality coefficient, and the predicted CTR of that impression. The best combination enters the block. Predicted CTR takes part in Direct’s predicted bid. The quality coefficient takes into account how the person behaves after the click.

The charged price on Yandex search and on search placements of the Advertising Network is calculated by VCG. On thematic Advertising Network placements and in external networks it is calculated by GSP. Traffic volume is not constant and is calculated for the query. In the example of a premium block with four places and no extended formats, the volumes are 100, 85, 75, and 65. The example bids, with the same quality and predicted CTR, are 10, 7, 5, 3, and 2 ₽: the four larger bids enter the block. The volume and bid numbers are an example of one block, not the campaign’s average price.

The auction runs on every impression, and the bid is the maximum click price after adjustments. The charged price can exceed the bid, including when a high conversion probability is predicted. The page does not call a price above the bid click fraud. In statistics, charged prices are shown without VAT by default.

A raising adjustment increases the bid for its audience. After you lower a bid, the old price can still be charged for up to 30 minutes. If you lowered the bid in a stopped campaign, after you turn it on the campaign becomes active in about 40 minutes on average, and the new bids follow about 30 minutes later. Thirty and forty minutes are bid-application times, not an antifraud window.

Average click price is for the week, not for one click

In the “Maximum clicks” strategy, the average click price is the week’s spend divided by the week’s clicks. Adjustments affect it. The minimum for rubles is 0.9 ₽. Other currencies have other minimums on the page. The average-price limit holds for a calendar week if the strategy ran the whole week without changes or stops. Within a day the average can sit above or below the value you set.

If the week has fewer than 100 clicks, the week’s average can exceed the value you set, but by no more than two times. The minimum weekly budget of this strategy is 300 ₽, and the budget for a period is 50 ₽ a day. Those thresholds are the strategy’s conditions for rubles, not a “expensive click” benchmark and not a sign of fraud.

In Metrica’s “Sources, expenses, and ROI” report, CPC is labeled as the cost of one click. Spend there is the sum without VAT from the file you passed. Other ratios sit beside it: CPA of a goal visit is spend divided by goal visits; CPA of a goal visitor is spend per goal visitors; CPA of a goal completion is spend per completions; CPA of a purchase is spend per purchases, and that one needs ecommerce revenue. A goal has to exist before a goal CPA. The formulas are fractions with no separate subtraction of spam, robots, or invalid clicks. For the Market source, money amounts arrive in conventional units, 1 unit = 30 ₽, and can be updated for 90 days.

Networks do not rewrite the search click price

On thematic Advertising Network placements and in external networks, the click or conversion price depends on the placement’s audience quality, competition, and how many placements exist in the topic. Ad CTR in the networks does not affect the click price on Advertising Network search or on Yandex search: the search click price includes only impressions and clicks on the main search results pages. A lower CTR in the networks, the help says, does not raise the search click price because of that.

That is the boundary of two auctions, not a promise that a network click is cheaper. Who calculates the charged price is already stated: VCG on Yandex search and on search placements of the Advertising Network, GSP on thematic Advertising Network placements and in external networks.

The share of spend that went to clicks with no buyer is not built into these formulas. How to count that share separately is covered in budget loss. Robot share in a Metrica report is not the same as clicks removed from CPC either: what that percent means is in the article on robot share.