Yandex Metrica Review: A Free Analytical Tool

Yandex Metrica is a really cool and free analytical tool that gives you a lot of data that can help you improve your website growth.

Not sure where this has been hiding all my life, but I am glad it found me. I am a data nerd, I have to be to do SEO and make sure I am helping my clients get where they want to be. We use a lot of tools here at 2 Dogs Media to do research and analysis – but now we have a new one that we may add to our arsenal.

We still have a lot of data analysis, research and testing to do with it before we will add it to our recommended WordPress tools list – but it is looking very good so far so we wanted to share it.

What Is Yandex Metrica?

Yandex Metrica is a free tool (and I am shocked it is free for all that it offers) – that gives so much amazing data about your website visitors that you can use to improve everything from your content to website structure.

It is basically Google Analytics on steroids.

Apparently it has been around since 2009 but I only recently heard about it and tried it out. The short time I have been using it – I have fallen in love.

This post will cover how to install Yandex Metrica and show you some great information you can get from it.

Creating A Yandex Metrica Tag

While there is a plugin to install Yandex Metrica we always encourage website owners to limit plugins and install things without them when you can and that is what you will find below!

1. Create a Yandex account here
2. Once you have created your account, you will need to create a TAG that you can place on your website and you can start that here when you are logged in to your Yandex account. See screenshot below.
3. Tag name: This is what will show in the admin – usually can just be your website name – ours is 2 Dogs Media
4. Website Address: Enter your URL but do not put http:// or https:// in the field just your domain like 2dogsdesign.com
5. Time Zone: Select your time zone
6. Session replay, scroll map, form analysis: I highly recommend turning this on so you can see how users interact with your website.
7. Click the create tag button

Installing Yandex Metrica Code

Once the above is done you will be directed to a page that has the code you will need to install on your website as shown below. There are a few different places you may need to place this code depending on your theme setup.

1. If you are on Genesis – go to GENESIS > THEME SETTINGS and place the code in your header script block
2. If you use a standard WordPress theme that has a header.php file you can place it in that file before the closing </body> tag
3. If you have another theme you will have to look through the documents for it to see how to add it
4. Click Start when you are done

You will also see a “configure goals” link next to the start button which is a whole other level of awesome!

Once you click Start – Yandex will begin processing your website to get the data it needs.

The Data

Once you are all installed and setup – the data will start pulling into your account and you will soon see some amazing metrics. For you data nerds out there this will be heaven!

There are several sections to the dashboard and below we are outlining what you will find in each.

Reports

Just like any other reports there is a whole lot of data you can pull from the Metrica tool. There is a collection of premade standard reports like:

• Traffic
• Conversions (if you set any up)
• Sources
• Content
• Technology
• …and more

But you can also add your own custom made reports and even tag them as favorites for easy access later.

Maps

Map data will only be provided to those that allow their websites to be show in an iframe. If you have included code to disable this feature then the maps data will not be collected for you.

Click Map – this will show you how uses are clicking on your website – whether there is a link there or not.
Link Map – this will show you the popularity of links on a page and will show the number of clicks and the percentage of clicks out of the total for the page.
Scroll Map – shows where users are paying extra attention to a page with a color coded guide
Form Analysis – shows form conversion rates and how forms are being filled out so you can see how many people view and submit the form as well as how many leave the page and how much time is spent interacting with fields.

Session Replay

This is the part we found magical!

Session Replay actually records how people are using your website. So you can see exactly how users are scrolling and clicking through your website content.

In doing our own session replay we learned that people are clicking on the images on our home page – but they are not links. So, now we know to go make them links since the user expects them to be.

This is one of the main reasons to use this tool! To see exactly how visitors are going through your content will help you tremendously in writing better content and formatting your pages to fit how users are using them.

Goals & Filters

Goals and filters are all part of the tool as well. Goals you can set up when you create the tag and you can set filters to remove content that you do not want to report. Like sessions from you or your team members can be filtered out.

The Video

We hope this video will give you a good overview of the tool so you can see if it is a good fit for your organization.

Have You Used Yandex Metrica?

Have you heard of it or use it? We would love to hear your thoughts!

We are looking forward to diving deeper into this tool and hope to get some tutorials coming your way!