Website promotion and web analytics. Yandex Metrika

Website promotion is impossible without effective methods of assessing the performed advertising campaigns and other measures. Web analytics is responsible for receiving all information that is necessary for website promotion and correcting the promotions strategy (if necessary). Yandex.Metrika is one of the leading online services for web analytics in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet.

Yandex Metrika is a free service for web analytics. It is easy to guess that it is provided by Yandex, a popular Russian search engine. Initially Yandex Metrika was available only for advertisers of Yandex.Direct and helped them to track the effectiveness of their contextual advertising campaigns. However, now Yandex Metrika is available for all site owners.

To start using Yandex Metrika you should place a special code of the counter on your site. Display of the counter on the site pages is not obligatory; it allows the site owners not to reveal the service of web analytics which they actually use.

After you have placed the counter, the information about the site attendance starts being gathered at once. As a rule, it takes about 10 or 15 minutes for the actions of the site users to be displayed in Yandex Metrika reports.

Yandex Metrika provides the following web analytics services.

Demographic reports

Yandex Metrika can define main sociodemographic characteristics of the users (such as sex, age) according to the registration information of Yandex users. The site owner has an opportunity to evaluate the number of visitors belonging to a certain age group or gender, assess the site view depth for each of these groups.

Geographic reports

Modern advertising campaigns often have precise geographic targeting, in other words, orientation towards the Internet users from certain geographic regions. Yandex Metrika reports on the site users geography allow the site owner to evaluate the number of visitors from required regions.

Setting the goals

Goals can be understood as certain pages of the site; the site owner wants the target users to visit these pages. To such pages may refer: registration pages; order confirmation pages; mailing subscription confirmation pages; pages that contain a certain list of links; pages that contain contact information etc.

Besides, a certain number of pages viewed by the visitor can also be a goal because it demonstrates the efficiency of the advertising campaign. For instance, a visitor, who viewed 5 and more pages of the site, can be considered a target visitor, and a visitor, who viewed only one page, is considered an occasional one.

Yandex Metrika provides the site owner with an opportunity to set up to 10 different goals for his site and thus assess the site conversion rate in the most effective way.

Calculation of visitor (traffic) sources

When you carry out website promotion, it is very important to receive up-to-date information about the sources of traffic. For instance, if you want to evaluate the efficiency of an advertising campaign in Yandex Direct, you should know the exact number of visits the source of which this system was.

Yandex Metrika allows to receive information about the number of visits from the search engines, direct visits of the site (entering of the site URL directly into the browser address bar), visits from other sites etc.

Creation of maps: paths map, clicks map

Visualization of the map of paths through the site and click map gives the site owners an idea of the visitors' behavior on the site.

What site pages are attended most of all? How do visitors move from one page of the site to another? How do visitors find the target pages? Graphic reports provided by Yandex Metrika can answer all these and many other questions that concern behavior of visitors on the site.

The features that are listed above do not exhaust the tools provided by Yandex Metrika, but they are able to give an idea of functionality of this web analytics service.

Site owners, who use more than one system to analyze the site attendance, can often notice that information provided by different services do not always coincide. That is why the objectivity of information, provided by different online web analytics services, has been a moot point in many active discussions lately. The most heated debates concern the most popular web analytics services: Google Analytics and Yandex Metrika.

Every web analytics service (including Google Analytics and Yandex Metrika) has its own unique algorithm that helps to calculate the number of visitors and track their actions on the site. That is why certain difference in information provided by different services is absolutely normal.

In order to receive the most objective results of web analytics it is highly recommended to use several independent services. The averaged value of received numbers will be the most appropriate a starting point for planning further actions in website promotion.