Bid adjustments: how to cut suspicious segments

A bid adjustment in Yandex Direct changes the bid, the price, or the advertising-cost share for a chosen condition. The range is from −100% to +1,200%. −100% is supposed to exclude impressions. The help’s example: a 40 ₽ bid and +1,000% make 440 ₽. Forty and four hundred forty rubles are the arithmetic of the example, not your account’s bid. An adjustment does not define click fraud: it raises or removes a segment’s bid, it does not mark a click invalid.

If an adjustment of one type sits on both the campaign and the group, the group one applies. Zero percent on the group cancels the campaign adjustment for that group. A campaign-level minus does not reach a group where the same type is set to zero.

The bid, the charged price, and the weekly average

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.

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 an “expensive click” benchmark and not a sign of fraud.

“Maximum conversions” strategies with an average target, including average conversion price or advertising cost share, pick bids from a conversion forecast. The average is held for a calendar week; on individual days it can be higher or lower. The minimum for learning is 10 conversions a week, and 70 for app promotion. The help asks you to judge the result after 7–14 days. Those are learning conditions, not a fraud threshold.

An adjustment changes the target of that average. At 200 ₽ per conversion and a group adjustment of +50%, the group’s average conversion price is 300 ₽. If you need to stay on the price you set, the page suggests paying for conversions rather than for clicks. Cutting a segment with an adjustment shifts its average. It does not pull clicks out of the report after the fact.

An audience segment does not catch up at once

For an audience condition, the page warns that an impression under an already disabled condition is still possible. After the condition is met, the system needs up to 180 minutes to add the person to the segment. The example: −100% for people who have been on the site, and a visit at 12:00 — for up to 180 minutes the campaign’s ads can still be shown. A return at 13:00 is still treated as a new visitor, and the adjustment does not apply to them. The 180 minutes belong to entering an audience segment. The page does not carry that delay over to a device or region adjustment.

−100% for smartphones turns off impressions on mobile devices, not only in apps. One system can be removed on its own: −100% for iOS or for Android. You cannot set −100% on both systems at once. The page does not guarantee impressions on only one system: other mobile operating systems remain, and the example names Windows Phone. Impressions on mobile only means −100% for desktops. Advertising Network apps are not picked by identifier with this adjustment.

A suspicious segment cut by a bid does not become a list of invalid clicks. Whether Yandex returns the money is not settled by an adjustment. Who clicks without buying is in the article on who clicks ads. The difference between “click fraud” and “sklikivanie” is in the article on click fraud and sklikivanie.

You can cut a segment with an adjustment across the range from a full exclusion of impressions to a multiple increase of the bid. The weekly average takes that adjustment into account. An audience segment does not pick the person up in the same minute, and a device or region adjustment does not inherit that delay.