Which Yandex Direct sources send real traffic?
Not all Yandex Direct traffic is equal. ValidVisit scores every visit 0–100 and pins it to the exact source that sent it — so you can tell real humans from bots and invalid clicks, worst sources first.
YAN site/app in Yandex DirectThe advertiser pastes a comma-separated list of site domains and app names (up to 1,000 entries, including ad-exchange partner sites) into the campaign's disabled-sites field, which blocks impressions on those YAN placements.
ValidVisit reports the device, OS, browser — down to the version — plus the language and ISP behind every flagged visit, and Yandex Direct supports OS version, device type and connection type targeting. The segments we flag are segments you can exclude.
How invalid traffic slips in through Yandex Direct sources.
Yandex Direct is the dominant paid search platform across Russia and CIS markets, serving ads on Yandex Search and distributing budgets across the Yandex Advertising Network (YAN) — a broad ecosystem of partner publisher domains. That two-channel structure creates two distinct click-quality problems: on Yandex Search, repeated automated clicks on branded and high-value commercial keywords push costs up and distort bid-optimization signals; across YAN, certain partner placements generate click volumes that look nothing like the intent-driven sessions that search inventory usually delivers. ValidVisit examines each arriving visit against more than 100 independent data points — covering the network it came through, the device on the other end and the way the visitor actually behaves — and folds them into one 0–100 quality score per visit, then maps each scored event to the Yandex tracking tokens you pass. The result: you can see exactly which YAN publisher domains and which keyword-campaign combinations are skewing your conversion data, then act on that intelligence manually inside your Yandex Direct account.
On Yandex Search, the IVT pattern most worth watching is repeated, automated clicks against the same commercial keywords — particularly branded terms and high-bid non-brand queries. These sessions frequently trace back to server-farm infrastructure or proxies cycling through CIS-region IP addresses. Because the behaviour is scripted rather than human, the way these clicks present across ValidVisit's 100+ data points tends to cluster apart from the genuine organic search sessions you normally see — a divergence that is more diagnostic for search-channel IVT than browser-automation tells alone. Whether any given spike is consistent with competitor automation or a cruder form of scripted inflation is rarely certain; ValidVisit surfaces the patterns and the quality scores so you can form that judgment rather than asserting it for you.
On the YAN side, the dynamic is different. Partner placements that consistently earn low quality scores tend to share a few measurable traits: traffic routed through hosting or proxy networks rather than consumer ISPs, and an engagement profile that looks thin and mechanical compared to your Yandex Search baseline. Because ValidVisit captures the {source} placement token on every scored visit, you can build a ranked view of YAN partner domains sorted by IVT signal strength — and use that list to populate Yandex Direct's site exclusion tool (запрещённые площадки) manually, at whatever pace your account review process supports.
What to watch on Yandex Direct
A handful of YAN partner domains driving a share of clicks well above their share of downstream conversions is the most common sub-source quality problem in network inventory. The {source} token maps each click to the specific partner domain responsible, making concentration anomalies visible in ValidVisit's placement breakdown before they become a budget problem.
On Yandex Search, the same visitor returning against the same keyword inside a short window is a consistent indicator of scripted activity — whether competitor-motivated or otherwise. Filtering ValidVisit's dashboard by {keyword} surfaces which search terms attract the most anomalous repeat signals, helping you prioritize both exclusion decisions and bid-strategy adjustments.
Automated click tools disproportionately target the highest ad position because it is the most visible and the most likely to exhaust a competitor's daily budget. A concentration of low quality scores in {position}=1 that does not correspond to any change in your Quality Score or CTR trend is worth investigating as possible scripted top-position targeting.
Grouping IVT events by {campaign_id} helps you distinguish a campaign-wide infrastructure problem — where server-farm and proxy traffic dominates across all ad groups — from an isolated ad-group setup issue. That distinction determines whether the right response is a placement exclusion, a keyword bid adjustment, or a structural campaign change.
Pinpoint the bot publishers & placements in Yandex Direct.
Yandex Direct itself isn't the problem — bots and invalid traffic concentrate in a handful of its sub-sources: the publisher, site or zone, and the placement or widget within it. So we roll the score up by those Yandex Direct tokens, not by creative (which says nothing about whether a click was human).
Bought as one Yandex Direct line, your spend is a single number. Scored per sub-source it runs from 82 down to 13 — the worst is nearly all bots. That’s the leak a blended average hides.
Yandex Direct traffic scored 0–100 per sub-source, worst first — down to the placement you buy.
Bot / invalid-traffic score broken down by:
- Placement / Source
{source}Placement: the publisher domain where the ad was shown in the Ad Network, or 'none' for search.
Bot / invalid-traffic score broken down by:
- Position
{position}Exact position of the ad within its section.
Per-click id: Yandex Direct passes a unique click id, so we also run velocity, deduplication and repeat-source checks on every visit.
Compare bot & invalid-traffic breakdown across every ad network →See your own Yandex Direct sub-sources scored this way.
How ValidVisit attributes Yandex Direct traffic
Each Yandex Direct macro maps to a normalized parameter, so every scored click is pinned to the right campaign, creative and publisher.
https://yoursite.com/landing?utm_source=yandex-direct&utm_medium=search&vv_campaign_id={campaign_id}&vv_campaign_name={campaign_name}&vv_adset_id={gbid}&vv_ad_id={ad_id}&vv_creative_id={creative_id}&vv_keyword={keyword}&vv_publisher_id={source}&vv_placement_id={position}&vv_click_id={yclid}| Token | Yandex Direct macro | Maps to | Identifies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Campaign ID | {campaign_id} | campaign_id | campaign |
| Campaign Name | {campaign_name} | campaign_name | campaign |
| Ad Group ID | {gbid} | adset_id | adset |
| Ad ID | {ad_id} | ad_id | ad |
| Creative ID | {creative_id} | creative_id | creative |
| Keyword | {keyword} | keyword | keyword |
| Placement / Source | {source} | publisher_id | publisher |
| Position | {position} | placement_id | placement |
| Yandex Click ID | {yclid} | click_id | click |
- Yandex Direct macro
{campaign_id}- Maps to
- campaign_id
- Identifies
- campaign
- Yandex Direct macro
{campaign_name}- Maps to
- campaign_name
- Identifies
- campaign
- Yandex Direct macro
{gbid}- Maps to
- adset_id
- Identifies
- adset
- Yandex Direct macro
{ad_id}- Maps to
- ad_id
- Identifies
- ad
- Yandex Direct macro
{creative_id}- Maps to
- creative_id
- Identifies
- creative
- Yandex Direct macro
{keyword}- Maps to
- keyword
- Identifies
- keyword
- Yandex Direct macro
{source}- Maps to
- publisher_id
- Identifies
- publisher
- Yandex Direct macro
{position}- Maps to
- placement_id
- Identifies
- placement
- Yandex Direct macro
{yclid}- Maps to
- click_id
- Identifies
- click
How the detection works.
Data points → one score
Every visit is weighed against more than a hundred independent data points and reduced to a single, sortable 0–100 quality score.
Many angles, combined
Each data point is combined rather than checked in isolation, so a genuine human almost never trips enough of them to be flagged — and bots that beat one rarely beat the rest.
Proprietary, not a black box
The detection model is ours and stays that way. What you get is a clear verdict on every visit — not a single brittle rule you can game, and not an unexplained number you can't act on.
Pinned to the source
Every verdict maps to the campaign, publisher and placement that sent the click — so you know exactly which source to cut.
How ValidVisit helps you cut fraud and bad YAN site/apps on Yandex Direct.
Scoring and attribution are the means — the point is cutting the Yandex Direct traffic that wastes your spend. Here's how ValidVisit gets you a list you can act on.
- Score
See what's actually landing
You buy Yandex Direct clicks; what arrives are visits. ValidVisit scores each one 0–100 so real humans stand out from bots and invalid traffic — one script, no funnel hop, no fingerprinting.
- Attribute
Pin the fraud to its source
Every scored visit is tied to the exact Yandex Direct YAN site/app and zone via the network's own tokens — so the bad traffic has an address, not just a headline percentage.
- Cut
Take the YAN site/apps off your buy
You get the worst offenders as a ready-to-use list plus postbacks to your tracker — so you can exclude them in Yandex Direct and put your next dollar behind the traffic that converts.
Yandex Direct traffic quality, answered.
Does ValidVisit handle Yandex Search clicks and YAN partner clicks in the same setup?+
Yes. You apply a single destination URL tag once across your Yandex Direct account. The {source} token differentiates Yandex Search clicks from YAN partner placements — on search, {source} typically returns the search identifier or 'none'; on YAN it returns the partner domain. Both are scored together in a single dashboard so you can compare channel quality side by side without separate tracking configurations.
How do I turn ValidVisit data into Yandex Direct site exclusions?+
In ValidVisit, filter your visits to the Yandex Direct property and sort by quality score. Export the publisher report grouped by {source}. Any YAN domain whose IVT signal consistently runs well above your campaign baseline can be added to your site exclusion list directly inside Yandex Direct's interface. ValidVisit produces the scored list; the exclusion decision and the submission to the platform are yours to make — there is no automated push to the Yandex Direct API.
Yandex Direct's own filters already reject some invalid clicks. What does ValidVisit add?+
Yandex Direct's built-in click quality system filters at the network level and reports summary data in Yandex Metrica — you see the result but not the reasoning, and the calibration reflects the interests of the aggregate advertiser base rather than your specific account. ValidVisit scores your traffic independently after each click arrives, before those events touch your analytics stack, weighing 100+ data points spanning network, device and behaviour into a single 0–100 quality score you own regardless of which platforms you run. That makes it useful both for validating what Yandex's filters catch and for surfacing the sub-source and keyword patterns that account-level aggregate filtering may not surface.
Detect fraud on other search networks
Find the bots in your Yandex Direct spend.
See which publishers and placements send real buyers vs bots — every visit scored 0–100, worst first.
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