When a business says its ads don’t pay off, the cause is almost always in one of three places. You can check each of them yourself in a single evening.
If even one of these raises doubts, it’s too early to raise bids or budget: fix the leak first.
For a business selling in Russia, the main channel is Yandex Direct. Yandex holds a large share of search, and its advertising network adds reach across websites and apps. The auction weighs predicted click-through rate as well as the bid, so a precise ad text and sitelinks can lower the cost per click as effectively as raising the bid.
Google Ads fits a different situation — when your customers are outside Russia: exports, CIS countries, an international audience. Google has suspended ad serving to users in Russia since 2022, so for a local business this channel is usually irrelevant. The two systems also differ in ad formats, bidding strategies and analytics: Yandex Metrica for Direct, GA4 for Google.
Running both makes sense when the product sells both at home and abroad, and the budget is large enough for each campaign to collect the data automated bidding needs to learn. With a limited budget, it’s better to bring one system to a stable cost per lead than to spread the money too thin.
Cost per lead is ad spend over a period divided by the number of inquiries it produced. For an honest view of profitability, add management fees and tools such as call tracking to the ad budget.
Looking only at cost per click is a mistake. Cheap clicks often come from broad queries or network placements where very few visitors ever get in touch. A simple example: a 20-ruble click with a 0.5% conversion rate means a lead costs 4,000 rubles, while an 80-ruble click converting at 5% brings a lead for 1,600.
And a lead is not yet a sale. To connect advertising with revenue, you need a chain:
This way you see not only the cost per lead but the cost per sale for every campaign.