According to statistics, Yandex consistently ranks in the TOP-3 search engines worldwide. Yes, its market share is smaller compared to Google. But Yandex almost entirely covers the CIS countries, which is over 200 million people.
Advertising to this entire audience is launched through Yandex.Direct. But running gambling, betting, or adult offers via YAN is nearly impossible. That’s why the most accessible evergreen niche, even for beginners, is nutra.
And while Facebook* remains the top source for nutraceuticals internationally, in the CIS market it’s Direct that leads the way.
In this article, we talked to experts, studied open sources, and figured out how to run nutra campaigns via Yandex.Direct.
Budget, Offers, and Audience
Let’s start with the main thing — the starting budget size.
| “The best option is to top up your account with at least 30,000–50,000 and launch 2–3 campaigns for testing. YD will scale you up itself if your metrics are good—just keep topping up and monitor your stats,” — Dmitry, Head of KAM at Traffic Light. |
The offer you promote depends on the arbitrageur’s budget and experience. For example, white hat ecom passes moderation easily, campaigns last longer, but maintaining them is more expensive. Cosmetics, for instance, fall into this category. Weight loss, diabetes, and joint offers are harder to run: they often get banned in less than a week. Anything related to male enhancement, potency products, and other 18+ offers is almost impossible to run—moderation simply won’t let them through.
You can read in detail about how Yandex regulates dietary supplement ads, what’s allowed and what’s restricted, here. But basically, ads are prohibited from:
- creating the impression that dietary supplements are medicines or have healing properties;
- mentioning specific cases of recovery or improved well-being thanks to dietary supplements;
- including expressions of gratitude from people for using dietary supplements;
- using wording that may cause negative psychological states (in other words, no shock content);
- encouraging people to abandon healthy eating;
- presenting research results as proof of the product’s therapeutic effect.
There’s no definitive data on Yandex.Direct’s reach and target GEOs in the network. But according to Y.Radar, in 2025 the search engine covers up to 70% of the market. The rest is almost entirely taken by Google.
The core Yandex audience is young people aged 25 to 34.
But all other data depends heavily on the sites where the ads are shown and the arbitrageur’s targeting.
How to Launch Ads
There is no single way to launch ads: we’ll cover how to run whitehat nutra in the case study below, but with greyhat nutra you’ll have to work harder. The problem is that Yandex hardly allows products without certificates, licenses, or documentation. Most advertisers, who are essentially selling placebos, won’t be able to provide affiliates with such data.
| “Campaigns are running steadily now. Not without turbulence, of course—sometimes accounts get banned. The main challenge, as before, is moderation of prohibited or borderline topics,” — Dmitry, Head of KAM Department at Traffic Light. |
But we found one approach for launching greyhat nutra. The idea is this: you need to manually create a whitehat page, then pass moderation with it. Once you’re through, you can enable cloaking (for example, using filters in Keitaro) and drive traffic to your landing page.
How does this work in practice?
Let’s say we need to drive traffic to an anti-aging skin product from an agency account. First, select keywords like “skin care,” “skin cream,” etc. The whitehat page should be about caring for leather shoes, jackets, bags, and other items. After that, you need to pass moderation for headlines in YAN, and only then upload creatives.
| “If we’re talking about product offers, it’s all classic—product photo, a call-to-action headline, information about promotions and discounts or other benefits in the text and ad extensions. Ads should be filled out as much as possible so they take up more space on the platform,” — Dmitry, Head of KAM Department at Traffic Light. |
Most often, the only way to see what creatives competitors are using is to build up history through an anti-detect browser.
Campaign Setup
If you’ve ever launched ads on FB*, then starting and setting up Yandex.Direct shouldn’t be too difficult.
First, go to your dashboard and click the “Add” button. In the list that appears, select “Campaign.”
Here, choose the ad setup mode. They’re similar to the modes in Facebook*, so for convenience, let’s go with performance campaigns.
First, set the link to the whitehat page you’ll use for moderation. Later, you can replace this link with your landing page.
Next, specify the ad placements. Usually, you select what’s shown in the screenshot below.
After that, set your budget strategy.
| “In Yandex Direct, you can run campaigns for leads or for clicks. Lead-based campaigns take longer to ramp up and may run sluggishly. Click-based campaigns run more actively, but require more attention to analytics and placements,” — Dmitry, Head of KAM Department at Traffic Light. |
This is also where you set the conversion goal and its cost, if you choose this option.
Next, set your targeting: GEO, audience, and other parameters.
Then add keywords that are relevant to the offer.
At the final stage, upload your whitehat creatives, send the campaign for moderation, and top up your account.
Case Study: Nutra Campaign in Yandex Direct with 259% ROI
In fact, there aren’t that many case studies online about working with Yandex Direct in the nutra vertical. However, they do exist.
The author of this one chose a niche that interested him most — health and rejuvenation. He targeted a Russian-speaking audience aged 45+, with a payout model of CPA at the start and RS later on. The first lead purchase brought a 45% commission, and subsequent ones — 20%.
At the time the case was published in 2024, the lead price in YAN was around 80–100 rubles.
CPA didn’t work out, though it brought about 10% of the total profit. So most of the campaign was paid by RS.
The campaign was launched from a single agency account. The author notes that he only set gender and age for the audience, and Yandex algorithms handled the rest of the traffic selection.
The creatives were fairly neutral: half were taken from Freepik, and the other half were generated by AI.
The author specifically chose a whitehat offer because there were no moderation issues. Each campaign ran 5–10 groups with 5 ads in each.
The affiliate notes that there’s nothing complicated about working with Yandex Direct: you just need to update headlines and creatives in time and increase the budget. Thanks to this approach, he earned 20,000 rubles net in the first month and another 20,000–30,000 later through upsells.
So, over 2 months, the author spent about 30,000 rubles and earned 107,899 rubles, of which 77,899 was net profit.
Conclusion
Whitehat nutra runs in Yandex Direct without issues, but competition is higher. With greyhat nutra, moderation is tougher since Yandex quickly bans anything unlicensed. You’ll need creativity for alternative keywords, a reliable cloaker, a trusted domain, and an agency account. Also, to start in nutra, you’ll need a budget of 30,000–50,000 rubles for testing. Later, you’ll need to keep topping up your budget, work on headlines, and test new creatives.
| “If I were starting from scratch, the first thing I’d do is talk to my manager. They’ll tell you what’s trending right now. I’d also warn against running campaigns from personal accounts: I switched to agency accounts late and realized they’re much better to work with. I’ll add that you should test more, because you never know where you’ll find traction. And don’t forget to keep at least 10,000 in your balance for each active campaign. If you top up YAD with 50,000 and create 20 campaigns, you’ll barely get any traffic,” — Dmitry, Head of KAM at Traffic Light. |
Yandex.Direct rarely appears in affiliate media, but that doesn’t mean the source lacks potential. On the contrary, the less the community talks about a GEO, approach, or traffic source, the more opportunities there might be.
*owned by Meta, which is recognized as an extremist organization in the Russian Federation
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