When advertising on Yandex, why does my ad get shown for broad queries and why do so many users click?

Question

I'm using Yandex Direct - it is Russian contextual advertising system. We are creating and promoting sites, and started contextual advertising campaign.

There were a lot of keywords like "create site", "buy site", something with "seo" and so on. But there was also keyword "site", without anything. We saw that a lot of users were searching for something not about site development, but their queries still contained the word "site", so they saw the advertisement.

There were queries like: "russian railway site", "online dating" (in russian it contains word "site"), "site kinder-surprise" and MANY similar queries. Okay, it's understandable, that they saw our advertisement, because keyword for it was just "site". BUT our advertisement has title "site of any level of complexity to order", text was "unique design, seo, open price policy, at least 1200$".

I undestand, that it sounds bad in English, it doesn't matter, the essence is clear. SO, main problem was, that A LOT of people clicked on ad. CTR was 5%! We lost decent amount of money, because 5% of people, those were searching for something like "railway site" clicked on that ad. So, I'm interested - is here any sense to suppose, that something is bugged in yandex? Or this situation is normal?

I supposed, that many users open first links in new tab blindfold, when they are searching something. Of course, without separation of ads and search results. But no any other explanation yet.

Answer 1

I've never advertised on Yandex before, but the way that describe ad matching there sounds exactly like how Google Adwords works. So I would say that it is pretty normal.

You can get around these problems by specifying a "match type" for every keyword you bid on. So when you bid on site you want it to be "exact match" so that it doesn't trigger ads when the query contains that word. Here is an article that explains match types in Yandex. From that article, it sounds like you should be bidding on "site" (with the quotes) instead of site to get the exact match feature.

You can also specify negative keywords like site -railway so that your ad doesn't come up with railway related searches.

Users click on lots of things that you might not exect. I too have lost lots of money by bidding on keywords that get unexpected traffic. I was bidding on names of hotels for a hotel booking website. There is a Hilton Hotel in Paris France. I bid on "Paris Hilton" for it. Lets just say that not many people who clicked that ad were looking to book a hotel.