To get started, let’s use a small thought experiment: imagine a transport company. The company maintains a fleet of vehicles to deliver orders to their customers. However, the owner of the company is totally unaware of the number of items delivered, fuel consumed, vehicle condition, or order rejection rate. Seems a bit strange, doesn’t it? It’s doubtful that this is an effective business. But most importantly, running “blind” like this makes the company unmanageable. The owner can’t scale processes or plan for development.

That’s how your website will run if you don’t analyze it.

With web analytics, you can clearly understand what’s happening on your website. This knowledge puts you in total control of your online business. That’s why any website needs Yandex.Metrica, even if the website is still gaining momentum.

First of all, ask yourself why you need a website at all. Websites are usually created with a clear purpose in mind. Most often the ultimate goal is to earn profit. Businesses need to meet this challenge directly: the website must sell, meaning it converts users into customers.

Information portals and content projects handle the challenge of earning profit indirectly: when the website grows in popularity and number of users, ad revenue increases.

Since around 2015, the number of sites created “just in case” or “because everyone has one” has been steadily approaching zero.

Websites are a particularly good tool for meeting goals because you can measure their effectiveness anytime. You can split your ultimate profit-making goal into subtasks and use Yandex.Metrica to check how well your website performs at each stage of your value chain.

For e-commerce websites, you can measure how many users complete actions that lead to purchase: add items to the cart, submit their phone number, or open the company’s contact page.

For informational websites, you can track changes to the number of users and subscribers depending on article subjects, see how many pages a user opens, and see how often users come back to your website.

By measuring and analyzing metrics like this, you can see how well your website is meeting your expectations. Most importantly, you can see where exactly you need to focus your efforts to make your website more effective.

There are many different ways to use Yandex.Metrica. Let’s take a simplified website case as an example. In real life you need to track more factors, and we’ll focus on each of them separately in this course.

Example:

Let’s say you have a website and you spend 10,000 rubles to attract 2000 users per month using contextual ads. One out of a hundred users (1%) makes a purchase on the website. In total, you have 20 orders per month at 500 rubles per order.

Challenge: increase sales.

If you didn’t have Yandex.Metrica, it would probably make sense to increase the ad budget in order to expand the user audience. If you attract 4000 people, you’ll get 40 purchases.

However, your website’s rate for converting users into customers would still be 1%.

After you install Yandex.Metrica on your website, you can start improving your ad traffic ROI. Traffic sources almost always vary in effectiveness. For example, Yandex.Metrica might show your that out of 1000 users attracted by ad #1, 5 users make an order (0.5%), but out of 1000 people attracted by ad #2, 15 users make an order (1.5%). In this case, you can re-allocate your budget to increase the budget for ad #2 and decrease it for ad #1. This means that you can attract 200 users on ad #1 and 1800 users on ad #2 and get 28 orders instead of 20 for the same budget.

In this case, your traffic effectiveness will grow from 1% to 1.4% because you have “tailored” your traffic to your product.

You can also use Yandex.Metrica to increase the selling potential of your website. Yandex.Metrica offers inpage analytics tools to show specific actions of your users. You can view recordings of how users move the cursor. This helps you discover what’s missing in the design or structure of your website that might be preventing your users from converting.

For example, you might see how users first select a product, then scroll your About page back and forth, and then click out to the neighboring sections. Hypothesis: users are trying to find your delivery terms, but this section is hidden somewhere deep inside your website. If you make your website navigation more intuitive, you can increase the number of users that complete the purchase. You might try creating highly visible sections for Delivery and Pickup with clear information and engaging texts. If the hypothesis proves correct, you double your ROI.

As a result, your website effectiveness grows from 1% to 2% as you prevent your users from “dropping out” on their path to purchase.

As you can see, Yandex.Metrica gives you new opportunities to research user behavior and experiment with how to increase your website ROI. You’ll learn about the most popular methods in our lessons.

Our course is for everyone who wants to learn how to interpret numbers in business terms. With correctly configured Yandex.Metrica tools, you can measure your website’s performance. Discover where you lose customers and where you can focus your efforts to improve the effectiveness of your website and business.

You will benefit from this course if you are:

• Business owner
• Marketing expert
• Webmaster or web designer
• Sales manager
• Interested in online technologies
• Promoting your personal project online
• And would like to get deeper insights into user behavior

The goal of this course is to learn how to analyze website events and find out what prevents users from becoming your customers.