How to judge an ad contractor when the traffic is dirty
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Judging an ad contractor when the traffic looks dirty means separating clicks the ad account already excluded from spend from leads that never reached Yandex Direct because they were not matched to a visit. Click fraud by itself does not grade an agency: the platform may refund some empty clicks, while real people who never buy can still sit in the statistics.
The notes below follow what the Metrica and Direct help pages let a client see, without treating an access level as a traffic score.
What “dirty” means, and what the report already removed
Invalid clicks are a wider bucket than the everyday word for click fraud. The “Invalid traffic” report does not grade the contractor. It shows what the system already took out of spend. Direct does not subtract real people who simply had no interest from invalid traffic. A person who opened the ad, compared the price, and left can still be a paid click.
Click fraud and ordinary empty clicks are different mechanisms with the same effect on the bill. Who presses and why is covered in who clicks ads. For an agency review the motive is secondary: did the order reach the report that you pay and optimize against?
A refund for click fraud is the platform’s decision under its own rules. A rejected complaint does not prove the contractor is at fault, and a refund to the balance does not prove the traffic was clean.
A CRM order with no visit never reaches Direct
Metrica’s CRM help says an order is tied to the nearest visit of a person found by ClientId, phone numbers, or email. The help treats ClientId as more reliable for matching than a phone or an email, and it does not publish a success rate.
Without a match, the order is visible only in the “Visitors and clients” report and is left out of the other reports. Goals tied to the status of such an order are not sent to Direct when the visits belong to that advertising source. A contractor can honestly show more leads in the CRM and still not see them in the campaign: optimization learns from a different sample.
The matching window and later edits are not repeated here. For the review, the result is enough: an order with no visit does not enter the source reports or Direct.
Not every form fill is a sale
The “Classify requests” section of the same help page says it plainly: not every form fill or on-site order leads to a payment. Data on the “good” requests is passed so you can see which sales channels work. For Direct optimization, the help suggests goals on confirmed actions and deal statuses: redeemed orders, signed contracts, payment after a request.
The page does not define lead quality as a single number. Ranking agencies by raw form counts mixes paid deals with empty submissions. A workable check is the same “payment after request” or “signed contract” goal in the account, not a shared counter of submissions.
| What you look at | What it says about the contractor |
|---|---|
| “Visitors and clients” | Orders exist, but some may never have matched a visit |
| Other reports and Direct | Only orders that found a visit |
| Payment and contract goals | Channels where a request reached money |
| Raw form submits | Not yet a sale, and not a traffic grade |
Representative access is not a traffic grade
Direct’s help splits representatives into full access and read-only. Full access can change ads, view statistics, move funds, and pay for campaigns. Read-only can view settings and statistics, without the balance or payment. The number of representatives is not limited. Full access can be granted only to a login that is not registered in Yandex Balance.
The help recommends granting access to accounts you registered yourself: a representative with full access also manages campaigns in other Yandex commercial services. Removing the representative removes that access too. The access level is not a measure of traffic quality. An agency with full access can spend money; an agency with read-only access can only show numbers. Neither answers whether the clicks were clean.
Support talks about the login that wrote in
On the same page, support advises only on the campaigns of the login the request came from. The login is visible if you open ya.ru in a neighboring tab. A specialist gets access to the data only while handling the request. Phone access to campaigns requires a PIN.
That is an access rule for support, not a test by which the help page finds a contractor guilty of dirty traffic. If the agency writes to support from its own login, the conversation is about its campaigns. If the question is about your account, the request has to come from a login that can see that account.
Goals can be shared without opening the counter
Metrica’s goals help lets you allow ad campaigns to optimize on goals that already exist, without access to the counter. The Direct user then sees only the slice of statistics needed to judge the campaigns they created. That permission is not granted for retargeting or audience selection. On a recently created counter the option is on by default.
The page does not unpack “slice of statistics” into a list of reports. For a review it is a useful mode: the contractor optimizes campaigns on your goals and does not receive the whole counter. Judge performance by the goals you allowed, and separately check which CRM orders were matched to a visit at all.