How a Café in the Center of Vologda Achieved a 5x Return on Advertising with Yandex Direct

A case study on how a local delivery service managed to squeeze the maximum out of a minimal budget, the peculiarities of setting up ad campaigns with limited funds, and the thorny path to scaling up.

My name is Elvira, and I am a marketer at FoodSoul—an IT company that has been creating websites and apps for food and flower delivery services since 2013. Our team has helped launch over 3,700 businesses across Russia, all of which started their delivery services for free on our platform.

Few marketers know how to work with small budgets, but for me, as a specialist with over 6 years of experience in the HoReCa sector, this is not a problem. I have overseen more than 200 launches for food delivery services across Russia and abroad. I have run ad campaigns with various budgets, including very small ones—starting from just 3,000 ₽ per month. In this case study, I will share the specifics of launching campaigns with small budgets. 

The hero of today’s case is Linh Café: a Vietnamese cuisine delivery chain in Vologda. The establishment now has four branches throughout the city. Although there are few direct competitors in town, the website was created recently and needed promotion. Overall, the client’s request was simple and realistic: to appear among the top results on the search page using Yandex Direct.

Previously, Linh Café’s website had never been advertised, and Yandex Metrica wasn’t even installed. Everything proceeded as usual: developing a media plan, discussing promotions and ideas. But when it came time to top up the account, I was told: there’s almost no budget, we’re allocating 5,000 ₽ for promotion for the month.

Vologda is a city with a population of about 300,000, with dozens of direct and indirect competitors. Yandex Direct operates on an auction system. This means that those who invest more in advertising appear more frequently and higher in search results. Among the indirect competitors are giants like “Dodo Pizza” and “Vkusno – i Tochka,” who invest hundreds of thousands of rubles in promotion. There are also dozens of smaller players who are actively advertising.

The minimum budget for promotion is at least, I emphasize, at least 20,000 ₽; otherwise, at best, your ads won’t show at all, and at worst, your ads will appear for irrelevant, cheap queries. The chances with a small budget are slim, but the client decided to take the risk, as there was no way to invest more, and advertising was needed.

Crisis Setup and Ad Testing

We started with the basics and set up: 

• metrics on the website;
• goals for tracking;
• a reporting funnel.

In ad setup, reporting is half the battle. Without properly configured analytics, sometimes you can’t even launch the ads, and if you do, tracking results is meaningless without it.

Next came some sleight of hand, no trickery:

• We set payment per conversion—budget was spent only on completed purchases on the site. The cost per conversion was set at the minimum allowable level.
• We imposed a strict limit on order cost—the lowest possible for the food delivery niche.
• We set strict adjustments—there was no budget for testing, so we limited impressions as much as possible.

This approach severely limits the ad campaign: it gets fewer impressions and clicks, loses some potential customers, and ad testing is very limited. But if Yandex’s algorithms consider the budget sufficient, the results can be impressive.

Results

We achieved full payback on the ads and made a solid profit. With a budget of 5,000 ₽, we received:

• 987 people visited the website and viewed it 1,158 times;
• 30 placed an order on the website;
• According to Yandex E-commerce, which tracks users’ basket values, Linh Café earned 40,210 ₽;
• The average order value was 1,340 ₽, and the cost per order from ads was 166 ₽.

The ads brought in five times more money than was invested!

In addition to the financial victory, we also managed to improve the site’s ranking in Yandex search results. According to statistics, the number of impressions in search results overall increased by 66.55%.

Now, in detail:

• Impressions in the top positions increased by 91.18%;
• In positions 2-3, impressions increased by 104.84%;
• In positions 4-10—by 53.48%;
• In positions 11-50—by 12.58%.

In January 2026:

By May 2026:

According to Yandex Webmaster, we achieved our goal even with such a small budget. Impressions increased across all positions, but most importantly, in the top three. Overall, the site began to appear much more frequently in positions 1–3. This is also evident in regular user searches—Linh Café now appears at the very top of the search results, right after the ad spots, even without promotion.

Scaling the Ad Campaign

Unfortunately, the client is not yet able to significantly scale up the ads, but we are trying to increase the budget by at least 1,000 ₽ per month. This advertising mode is a crisis measure, not a permanent solution. What can be done in this case:

• Do not stop the ads—if Yandex’s algorithms have “learned” correctly and are delivering excellent results, you must not stop the ads—otherwise, the learning will be disrupted, and if you restart, the results may not be repeated.
• Add budget without changing settings—Yandex itself will prompt you to add more budget to avoid cutting impressions.
• With a higher budget, add testing and switch the ads to normal operation—this will allow you to capture as many potential customers as possible.

Conclusions

Small budgets always carry the risk that the algorithms will refuse to recognize your ads at all. But in the right hands, and with a bit of luck, even a small budget can become the first step toward a large and successful ad campaign.

Forty thousand rubles is indeed a modest result for food delivery advertising. But if you compare this amount to the 5,000 ₽ invested, it becomes clear that the result is impressive: the investment paid off fivefold.

We continue to work with Linh Café, gradually increasing the budget and slowly moving from crisis mode to standard advertising, so that Yandex Direct ads will bring proportionally greater results.

Best regards,

Elvira, FoodSoul marketer