A Complete review of Yandex Metrica

Your free analytics tool for your Yandex audience

If you are seasoned web analytics expert you can skip the intro and jump to the two most prominent features of Yandex Metrica — Session Replay Tool (Webvisor) and Keywords Report.

Yandex is one of the most popular and the largest search engine in Russia having a market share of almost 60% in the country. Yandex is also known for its several internet services and products and one such tool is Yandex Metrica, a powerful online analytic platform that provides a free analysis of visitor’s behavior and website traffic measurement tools. Since Yandex is dominating the internet in Russia and if you want to analyze the engagement of your Russian audience or simply looking for an alternative tool that is as powerful as Google Analytics, then Yandex Metrica is your answer.

Getting Started with Yandex Metrica

Yandex Metrica is absolutely free to use software that has a pretty simple and easy-to-use user interface with thoughtful menus and structured dashboards with excellent customer support services. Getting started with Metrica is simple as it just takes a couple of minutes to register with Yandex and once you are done setting up your account with Yandex, then go to https://metrica.yandex.com and enter your website name, URL, any subdomains need to be tracked, time zone, visit timeout, etc to get the HTML code to be pasted to your website.

The code must be added to all the pages in your website for accurate tracking of visitor behavior and website traffic. One can also change various settings to the HTML code by specifying various parameters like whether it is for XML sites or whether the code needs to be in a single line etc. By creating a single Yandex Metrica account you can track multiple websites too.

Yandex Metrica – Product Highlights

Now let’s see some of the important features that make Yandex Metrica stand out among other free analytical tools:

Monitor User Traffic

Yandex Metrica provides a comprehensive set of data on user traffic in terms of the day, month and year wise data. This is one of the basic needs of any analytical tools and Yandex Metrica goes way beyond in providing bounce rate of the users, Total Views of your website, New Visitors vs Old Visitors comparison and many more reports. You can see the user traffic data in real time on the Yandex Metrica website. It provides reports to understand which sources bring in more users to your website so that you can concentrate more on that source and see why other sources are bringing in less traffic and take necessary actions appropriately.

Understand Your Audience

Yandex Metrica also provides various statistics to understand more about your users by knowing where they come from, which devices they use to browse your website and which is the most used browser to access your site etc.

Measure Website Performance

With Yandex Metric, you can also measure the performance of all marketing and promotional campaigns and track the return on investment and on those campaigns and also develop custom events to track that is not being tracked normally. Conversion funnels can also be setup by selecting a particular set of action and watch where users move/drop from your site.

Monitor User Behavior

Yandex Metric also provides in-depth information on your user’s activities or their behavior on the website and how they interact or which pages they visit the most by using some special reports like click heat maps, scroll heat maps and session replay features.

Powerful Reporting

Yandex Metrica comes up with powerful fully customizable reports to provide you with comprehensive information about your user’s activities. You can also filter reports to get data about the no. of users driven to the site based on a specific promotion.

Yandex Metrica – Session Replay Tool (Webvisor)

Being on of the important features of Yandex Metrica, Webvisor is the Session Replay technology that records the actions the users on your website and plays it back as a video to you, so you can clearly see how users navigate your websites, which pages are viewed the most and see each and every action made on each and every page right down to every keystroke, click and even mouse movements.

This technology has helped a lot of site owners to understand their user behavior in great detail and rectify any usability problems to increase user retention and also the site conversion ratio. The click maps and links maps also can provide you with great detail on the overall user behavior on your website. To utilize the services of Session replay, you need to make sure it is enabled in your Yandex Metrica account for your website.

A simple glance at the data provided by Webvisor Session Replay tool can provide a great insight on how users navigate around your website, the difficulties they encounter while using your website and why they move over to another link quickly. But it is not possible to review each and every user’s action as it could take a lot of time, so what you can do is sort the users into various groups based on their location or various other criteria and take some sample users from different groups and analyze only those users.

See how Session Replay works

To start with, you can check users who didn’t stay on a page for a long time or people who added products to their cart, but didn’t checkout and complete the shopping process. By this way, you can clearly see where these users get stuck on your website and try to rectify it as soon as possible. There is an advanced filter system that lets you group user sessions based on various parameters.

Another key aspect of increasing user traffic and revenue from your website, you first need to look into the statistics of your home page or the landing page of your website. Landing page or the Home page need to provide links to all the services offered by the site and see how many percentages of users navigate to other parts of the website. The registration and order confirmation process page are major impact pages that can help in engaging users and in increasing your site's revenue. So, finally check in which stage does the site tend to lose users.

Yandex Metrica – Keywords Report

Still missing your keyword report in Google Analytics? Tired of zillions of 'Not Provided' keywords?

You can forget about this headache with Yandex Metrica! This tool provides clear and transparent reports about your inbound traffic. You can check not only high competitive keywords and your site performance in Yandex and Mail.ru (both are widely used Russian search engines) but long tail phrases as well.

As you can see in the screenshot below Metrica provides you with detailed data per each search phrase — no. of sessions and no. of users, bounce rate, page depth, and time on site. All you need is to navigate to Reports -> Standard Reports -> Sources -> Search Phrases.

And even more. You can see traffic volume per search engine for each keyword:

Sounds great, huh?

Conclusion

With two such prominent features as Session Replay (Webvisor) and Keyword Report, Yandex Metrica is absolutely must-use if you are planning to analyze and convert your Russian audience. You surely must use it in addition to your usual tracking tools.

Update:

More is coming!
On April 27 Yandex announced upcoming big update to its Session Replay tool, so-called Webvisor v.2.

Stay tuned!