Keywords

Keywords are single words or phrases that determine who your ad will be served to.

In Yandex search results, ads are served for queries that:

• Include the whole keyword (word-to-word matching).
• Semantically refine the keyword: include typos, synonyms, more specific words, or convey the same meaning in other words (semantic matching).

How it works

Keywords work differently in search results and in ad networks.

How to add keywords

You can use the side menu to add keywords: click Add → Keywords, select a campaign and ad group and click Add keywords. Use Keyword Generator or go to the Manual input tab to enter queries manually. Learn more about the keyword planner.

Additions or changes to keywords are implemented within 3 hours. To add keywords for a separate ad, create a new group for the ad.

Requirements and restrictions

Keywords may only contain Latin, Turkish, Kazakh, Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian letters, quotation marks, the “-”, “+”, and “!” symbols, spaces, and other Yandex Direct operators. Decimal points are allowed in decimal numbers. Letter case and word order are not important.

The maximum keyword length is 4096 characters (including negative keywords, spaces, and Yandex Direct operators). The number of keywords per group cannot exceed 200. Each keyword can contain a maximum of 7 words.

Overlapping and duplicate keywords

If keywords overlap (a keyword contains one of the other keywords), negative keywords are added automatically. This prevents keywords from competing with each other when selecting an ad to show.

Any recurring words in a keyword are reduced to one instance. For example, the keyword Baden-Baden will be reduced to just Baden. Ads will display for both the search terms Baden-Baden and Baden.

Stop words

Stop words are auxiliary parts of speech or pronouns that are automatically excluded from the keyword when selecting which ads to serve. For example, in the query how and when to travel to mars, ads with the keyword travel mars will be served. How, and, when, and to are stop words.

However, stop words can sometimes be important, and omitting them can change the meaning of the keyword. For example, for the TV show “In the heat of the night”, the keyword is in the heat of the night. The prepositions in and of are stop words, but they are crucial to the keyword's meaning. To ensure stop words are part of the keyword, you can enforce them with operators “+” or “!”, but this is optional.

Yandex Direct will consider how stop words affect the meaning of the keyword and exclude impressions for irrelevant queries. The validation of a keyword where stop words are not enforced goes through several stages:

1. Stop words are enforced. The ad will be displayed for the keyword, including prepositions, conjunctions, and other stop words. In the statistics, such an impression is attributed to the keyword with the word-by-word match type because all the words of the keyword are used.
2. The non-enforced stop words are removed. The keyword is assessed using semantic match technologies. If the keyword has a different meaning without the stop words, the ad won't be served. If the meaning remains the same, the ad will be displayed for the keyword without stop words. In the statistics, the impression is attributed to the keyword with a semantic match type.

In Yandex Direct, you can set up impressions for keywords that consist entirely of stop words.

Examples

• For the keyword buy an apartment in Moscow, impressions from queries including buy an apartment in Moscow will be recorded as a word-by-word matching in statistics. On the other hand, impressions for the queries containing buy apartment Moscow will be recorded as a semantic matching.
• For the keyword In the heat of the night, impressions for word-by-word matching will be served for the queries containing in the heat of the night. No impressions will be served for queries containing only the word night.
• For the keyword +in the heat +of the night, impressions will be served for the queries including in the heat of the night.