How to narrow geo and the impression schedule

Geo and the schedule in Yandex Direct narrow impressions. They do not decide whether a person or a program is in front of the ad. The geotargeting help describes how the audience is picked, not a way to catch a bot. The signs that make traffic worth a closer look are collected in signs of click fraud. Here is what actually changes when you close a region or an hour.

Who geotargeting reaches

Direct’s geotargeting shows ads to people who live in the selected region permanently, are there now, or are interested in the product. The help page says the system looks, in real time, at more than coordinates: the context of the query, how geolocation changes, and the regions where the person buys more often.

An ad can therefore be seen by people who turned off location sharing or changed the device’s geolocation, and by someone who is in another region now but usually buys in the targeted region. The page’s example: a Perm resident on a business trip in Moscow may see ads for furniture shops in Perm. That is an illustration from the help, not a campaign statistic. Removing “Moscow” from the geo does not guarantee that the Perm shop disappears for a person passing through Moscow, if the system ties that person to interest or to Perm as a permanent region.

The reverse follows from the same description. A person physically in your city may not be the only one who sees the ad. A region list is not a fence that contains only local devices.

Where the region is set

The impression region is chosen in the campaign or ad group settings, in the block “Geography of impressions”: countries, regions, and cities, or an area on the map. A checkbox on a region includes every locality inside it, even if that locality has no row of its own. You cannot clear the region and keep “only cities from the list” with that checkbox. A checked region brings the localities inside it along.

A separate city or region can be chosen when the population is from 1,000 people. One thousand is the threshold for picking a region in the tree, not the minimum reach of a campaign. A smaller city may not appear as its own row, and that does not mean the campaign must reach a thousand residents.

Next to the impression regions there is a field for regions to exclude. An exclusion cuts a region out of the pick. It does not inspect the visit on the site and does not answer whether the click was a goal.

An ad with geotargeting can sit on a site in another region, while a visitor from the configured region is the one who sees it. The sentence comes from the networks questions page. On that page the placement and the person’s region do not have to match. Narrowing geo to your city and then finding a placement from another city is a consequence the page already describes, not a broken report.

What the schedule cuts

By default, Direct ads run around the clock. The schedule is set in the block “Impression schedule” on the campaign parameters page, by a template or by cells of days and hours. The sum of impressions is at least 8 hours a week. Eight hours is the schedule minimum, not “a working day”. One Monday shift does not meet that minimum if the cells add up to less than eight hours in the week.

A campaign has one time zone. Reports and the start date stay on Moscow time. For different zones the help page advises different campaigns. One schedule “9 to 18” on a campaign that sells in both Vladivostok and Kaliningrad is counted in the campaign’s single zone, while report rows still lie on Moscow time.

Time targeting limits the time of impressions, not of clicks. A click can happen hours later if the tab was left open. An hour you turned off does not recall an ad already shown. A night click on a tab opened in the daytime does not argue with the schedule: the impression was in an allowed hour.

Even in an hour that is off, phrase bids take part in the calculation of the predicted bid. Closing the night so that “night clicks do not train the price” is not a promise this page makes. How the click price rises on the same budget is covered in why the click price rises. The advice not to limit a campaign to office hours is a recommendation of the same schedule page, not a ban. An office timetable can be set. The help page explains why it does not recommend that: you yourself turned impressions off outside those hours, while a click on an old tab and a bid’s part in the prediction do not disappear with the cells.

Holidays are set apart

In the block “On holidays” you can set a different impression time or ban impressions. Holiday dates are taken from the country selected in time targeting. For Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Turkey the help page names the official non-working days and the transferred days of those countries. For other countries it uses Russian legislation.

The page does not promise that a click on a holiday will not be charged if the impression was earlier. That continues the rule about the tab: the hour of the impression is cut, not the hour of the click. A ban on holiday impressions does not erase a click on an ad opened the day before.