AI Yandex.Direct Manager: pay for leads, not for Yandex's metrics
Our AI Yandex.Direct Manager runs your campaigns around the clock and counts results honestly: calls and form submissions, not the 'engaged sessions' and catalog opens that Yandex quietly logs as conversions of its own. In parallel, it filters out bot traffic and cleans up placements — on our own anti-fraud engine. The big decisions stay with you, and your data is processed on our infrastructure in Russia.
Why the dashboard shows conversions while the CRM stays silent
The budget leaks not only to bots — more often to whatever Yandex credits to itself.
Yandex counts engagement as a conversion
Three page views, an 'engaged session', a catalog open — Yandex counts these events as goals by default. The auto-strategy dutifully optimizes toward these empty signals, the dashboard paints a high click-to-conversion rate, and yet the calls and leads never grow.
Bots and click fraud
In competitive niches, a sizeable share of clicks are bots and scripts burning your budget instead of your customers. You pay full price for every one of them, and not a single lead comes back.
Search terms, placements, and bids with no daily supervision
Without daily cleanup of negative keywords, Yandex Ad Network placements, and bid corrections, the budget bleeds into off-target impressions and overpaid positions. The contractor checks in once a week — but the budget is spent every day.
What our AI Yandex.Direct Manager does
We connect the AI Yandex.Direct Manager to your ad account and Metrica, and — on request, for precise lead counting — to your telephony and CRM. It counts neither clicks nor Yandex's soft auto-goals, but the calls and leads that actually happened.
- Separates real leads — calls and form submissions — from Yandex's soft auto-goals, reconciling clicks directly against telephony and CRM where needed
- Tracks and blocks bot clicks, adding their IPs and subnets to exclusions
- Cleans up search terms and negative keywords every day, and disables junk Yandex Ad Network placements
- Adjusts bids by actual payback — by leads, not by engagement
- Tests and rewrites ads, watching CTR and relevance
- Puts two numbers side by side in the report: 'conversions' per Yandex and real leads — so the gap is obvious at a glance
How we launch it
Connect the account and goals
We take access to Direct and Metrica and work out what the auto-strategy is really optimizing for right now
Audit and cleanup
We go through the campaigns and clear out the accumulated junk in search terms, negative keywords, and placements
Set up counting by real leads
We drop optimization toward soft auto-goals, reconcile clicks against telephony and CRM where we have access, and switch on anti-fraud
Reporting and adjustments
A regular summary with two figures — Yandex 'conversions' and real leads; major changes only with your sign-off
The first months — with a dedicated manager
The AI is not launched “as is” and left unattended. For the first 1–3 months a dedicated manager runs your process: tunes the system to you, checks every result and fixes mistakes — while the AI learns on your real data in parallel. Nothing goes live without a human in control.
Dedicated manager
A dedicated specialist runs your process by hand together with the AI: tunes it to your documents and rules, checks every result, corrects mistakes. The system learns on your data.
Autopilot or ongoing support
Once quality is stable, you decide: move the process to autopilot (cheaper, the AI works on its own, the manager on standby) or keep permanent support.
Ongoing oversight, if you want it
For critical processes — primary documents, paid ads, contracts — many keep the manager for good: they backstop it, develop scenarios and own the result.
This removes the main fear of automation — “what if it makes a mistake”. Until the AI has proven its accuracy on your tasks, a human is accountable for the result. We agree the format and cost of support around your process.
Where your data is stored
The AI Yandex.Direct Manager works with ad statistics and de-identified visit data. To reconcile real leads it can connect to your telephony and CRM, but it takes only the fact of a call or submission and its source — no call recordings or customer personal data enter the ad analysis itself. All processing runs on our infrastructure in Russia.
More about a local neural network on your own server →FAQ
Related reading
We cover this topic in more depth on the blog
See the gap between 'conversions' and real leads
We'll send you a breakdown of your account: how many 'conversions' Yandex credits to auto-goals and how many of those are genuine calls and leads. Plus how much of your budget goes to bots. The audit is free.
Let us try it on your data
Describe the task and send a couple of typical documents or examples — we will show how the system handles them, before any contract.