Netmarble Yandex Ads in Russia: Driving 471K Clicks for a New Dark Fantasy Game
Attract Russian players to the new dark fantasy MMORPG King Arthur: Legends Rise with a multi-format Yandex Ads campaign, cost-efficient clicks and broad reach.
Background
RMAA received a brief from Netmarble, a South Korean game developer and publisher, on a promotional campaign for a new dark fantasy MMORPG King Arthur: Legends Rise in Russia. The country represents a vital and highly profitable market for the MMORPG genre, and Netmarble initiated this partnership after noticing a growth in the game's popularity among local players. The developer saw this rising interest and wanted to use this opportunity to reach even more gamers across the country.
The project started without the access to web analytics tools. RMAA recommended installing Yandex.Metrica to track Russian users but the client neither implemented it nor shared access to their current platforms.
Furthermore, the official landing page was very basic and featured limited localized content. Since the website could not perform its standard marketing role, the digital ad creatives themselves had to carry maximum information to educate, filter, and capture players.
Goal
RMAA needed to rapidly scale up traffic and dominate the local gaming space from day one, despite having zero tracking data on user behavior inside the website. To succeed, we had to test over 7 distinct audience segments and manage a Yandex budget under highly unstable bidding algorithms. The success of the campaign depended on our ability to optimize the entire campaign "on the fly" using only external performance metrics while maintaining a low cost per click.
Solution
Pre-Launch Preparation
Ahead of any paid placements, RMAA mapped the Russian gaming market and the communities formed around competing MMORPG titles such as Raid: Shadow Legends and AFK Arena. We designed seven distinct audience segments that combined competitor brand searches, genre keywords like SRPG and RPG, broader queries for dark fantasy, and interest signals from major gaming portals such as Igromania and Playground.
To compensate for the thin landing page, the creative had to carry more of the messaging than usual. Every ad named the PC platform and the dark fantasy genre directly in the headline, so the copy itself acted as a self-filter at the moment of the click. Desktop players who fit the category kept moving down the funnel, while mobile users and casual gamers, who would not convert on a PC MMORPG, were nudged away from clicking and saved the client unnecessary spend.
Campaign execution
The campaign went live on November 29, 2024. During the first hours, every line item passed through Yandex's standard automated activation phase. As soon as it ended, RMAA narrowed targeting to male desktop users aged 18 to 44, since this profile matched both the genre of the game and the available creative. The calibration locked the auction onto the core segment and made the next round of format-level tests readable.
Master of Campaigns, Yandex's automated multi-format tool, was switched on and switched off within the first few days. The system pushed spending toward high-cost search inventory instead of the cheaper network placements that the plan relied on, which raised the CPC. It also started competing with the other ads inside the same Netmarble account, so we disabled the tool to protect both the daily budget and the rest of the auction setup.
Standard search ads ran in parallel with autotargeting on the core keyword set. Because intent on these queries was already high, search reached a CTR of 3.93%, which made this format both the most engaged and the most expensive click of the run, in line with what high-intent inventory typically returns. This strategy successfully delivered 402,218 impressions and 15,826 highly targeted clicks.
Yandex Advertising Network (YAN) placements and graphic banners were tested as a separate track. We paired text-and-image creatives with video extensions to give visual users something to react to, and the graphic units were placed into independent campaigns so they would not bid against search ads inside the same account. Targeting on this track focused on competitor audiences and visitors of major gaming portals. This separation successfully delivered a massive volume of 191,761 clicks, optimizing efficiency across 86,792,421 impressions.
Tactical Budgeting and Ad Delivery Optimization
Working without Yandex.Metrika forced the agency to rebuild its optimization logic around upper-funnel signals. Because there was no way to read bounce rate or session depth on the client's site, our team tracked daily CTR and CPC, derived a CPM from spend and impressions. To make the setup react to those signals fast enough, we executed a two-step optimization between December 2 and December 5, 2024.
- 24-Hour Budget Cycle: We disabled weekly pacing in favor of a daily "Budget for the period" setting. This stopped uneven algorithm spending and gave our specialists direct control over bids during auction shifts.
- Structural Segmentation: We narrowed the focus inside the performance mix to the placements that responded best to platform-side metrics, namely Video Extensions and Image Ads. Because each audience segment ran in an independent line, we could compare cost-efficiency across these formats through VTR and CPC instead of through on-site behavior.
Focusing on Video Formats
After December 5, 2024, with the daily cycle and refined structure in place, the project entered its active scaling phase. The strategy concentrated on video and rich-media inventory, since these placements lowered the cost per branded contact and widened reach across the audiences.
Video creatives turned out to be the most cost-efficient option of the entire run. It held a CTR of 0.88%. This track alone accumulated 29,638,926 impressions and 261,224 clicks, making it the cheapest channel in the mix and the main driver of the final reach total.
Results
Within the agreed budget, the work delivered the following outcomes:
- Total Impressions: 116M+
- Targeted Clicks: 471K+
- Video Views: 12.9M+
- VTR (View-through Rate): 43.86%
