Yandex implemented quantitative indicators to measure quality of websites in the Yandex Advertising Network (YAN). In addition to regular moderation, partner websites will also undergo automated check-up.

The first automated check-up is followed by manual examination by a moderator. In perspective, it will speed up the entry process for quality websites looking to become the YAN members. This will also allow monitoring the existing members, whose quality might change after they join the Network. Website quality is measured automatically using data from Yandex.Metrics.

“User behavior on a made-for-advertising site differs from what a user does on a made-for-users site,” says Anton Popov, head of the Yandex Advertising Network. “There are many parameters describing user behavior, such as, time spent on a website, time spent on one page of this particular website before switching to another page or before clicking on an advertisement, number of users leaving a website after viewing only one page on it etc. Both the website quality and the way it generates traffic may contribute to the website low conversion rate. Untargeted traffic is not what Yandex.Direct offers to its clients and may be the cause for a website to lose its membership in the Network”.

Right after Yandex started using quantitative indicators in its website moderation technique, several hundreds websites dropped out of the YAN.
Yandex.Direct is the first and the largest ad-serving system for contextual advertising on the Russian Internet. Ads are displayed for millions of users on search results pages and on the pages of the Yandex Advertising Network. Currently, the audience of the Yandex Advertising Network is more than twice larger than the one on the Yandex search results pages. In March 2008, the number of ads displayed on the Yandex Advertising Network websites exceeded 7.5 billion and keeps growing.