Marketers vs Dead Clicks
Year: 6, Month: 9, Week: 3, Day: 5
This Tale is about how bureaucracy in VK Ads (ads platform of VK, a Russian social network) slowed us down, while a channel on Yandex Zen (Yandex’s content platform) learned to walk on its own — supported by a careful “suction tube” from Yandex Direct (Yandex’s PPC platform), after a long stagnation.
We connected Zen to Yandex Metrica (Yandex’s analytics tool), connected Direct, and launched a master campaign (auto-optimised campaign type) towards a goal. Direct brought clicks confidently, numbers in the reports grew, CTR looked decent. On paper it looked like success, in the body it felt like empty motion. In Metrica we saw a big share of visits with 0 seconds and a bounce.
Zen was “clicking the turnstile,” but almost nobody stayed inside the hall.
So we made a small, principled turn. In Metrica we set up a separate goal: a non-bounce visit with a 15-second threshold. It’s a filter based on a simple presumption: a person who spent at least 15 seconds on an article is likely reading, not misclicking.
We reconfigured the campaign. Now Direct optimises for reaching that goal, not for “any click.”
In practice, we made a deal with the algorithm: “Friend, bring people who actually live on the page for a bit. We won’t pay for the rest.”
Zen stopped inflating with dead numbers and started growing through people who were genuinely interested. The budget melts slowly, almost by a teaspoon per day, and every teaspoon has substance. The channel gets quality traffic, organic growth forms around articles, read-through and return visits rise. We don’t drown it with bursts of empty clicks. While lawyers and accountants wrestle with VK Ads requirements, Zen already has a stable inflow of the “right” readers from Direct, and this link works like a small growth engine.
What we really achieved is a working system: Zen is tied to Metrica, Metrica is tied to Direct, Direct is trained to bring real readers, and it boosts organic carefully and efficiently. The channel wakes up, levels up, gains mass, while content improves in parallel. We don’t plan to switch this off. We plan to polish it further, increase volume, and keep it as a permanent loop.
Why this matters for their niche: pet food. It’s an LTV (customer lifetime value) game. Content warms people up, so when they reach the first purchase, they are already closer to repeat buying.
Result you can apply: Optimise for engaged sessions, not raw clicks. Build an end-to-end analytics loop, then let paid traffic boost organic with control. For LTV products, content warm-up is part of the funnel.
