Yandex Announces Changes to Campaign Management in YAN Starting April 2024

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

Yandex, a prominent technology company, has unveiled plans to modify how advertisers manage their campaigns on the Yandex Advertising Network (YAN), marking a significant shift in its advertising strategy. Starting April 22, 2024, Yandex will phase out the “Maximum clicks with manual bids” option for campaigns running on both its search engine and the YAN. This move will limit campaign strategies to either “Maximize conversions” or “Maximize clicks,” steering advertisers towards more automated bid management solutions.

This update is slated to roll out in stages, beginning with the discontinuation of new campaigns using manual bid control on April 22. Following this, from May 20, adjustments to bids in existing campaigns that utilize manual control will no longer be possible. By June 2024, all active campaigns employing manual bidding strategies will cease operation. Yandex emphasizes the need for advertisers to transition to alternative strategies to avoid disruptions in their advertising efforts. While stopped and archived campaigns will default to the “Maximize Clicks” strategy, they will not resume automatically.

Yandex assures that advertisers will receive ample notifications ahead of each phase to prepare for the upcoming changes. This decision comes after a preliminary announcement made in early 2023, where Yandex had hinted at the discontinuation of manual bid management, citing the then-limited capabilities of automated strategies to address specific advertising challenges. However, with advancements in Yandex’s automated tools and the overwhelming adoption of auto-strategies—now exceeding 95%—the company is confident in fully transitioning to these more efficient options.

Additionally, Yandex highlights its efforts to expedite the application of settings within the YAN interface, signaling an ongoing commitment to improving user experience and campaign effectiveness on its platform. This update reflects Yandex’s broader strategy to harness automation for enhancing advertising performance, simplifying campaign management, and ensuring optimal use of advertisers’ budgets.

Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor