The new report will be especially useful if you use multiple advertising systems to promote your business. Yandex.Metrica automatically calculates the ROI (return on investment) of each paid channel and allows you to show advertising costs, profitability, conversion rates, and other indicators for all advertising sources on a single page. This makes it possible to quickly get answers to important questions, chief of which is how your ad campaigns can perform more effectively.
To understand which placements work best for your business, it is insufficient to compare sales revenue for different products or services that you advertise. It is better to focus on ROI: this indicator allows you to see which placement brings more relative to your investments.
You can compare profitability and other metrics not only for an entire channel, but also for individual campaigns, creatives, or keywords. The new report can help you identify campaigns performing below your expectations so that you can then make changes to their settings.
How it works
Data on ads in Yandex.Direct is automatically gathered in the new report, but data from other advertising systems must be uploaded to Yandex.Metrica separately.
If you already transmit revenue data in Yandex.Direct via goal cost in Yandex.Metrica or e-commerce, then you can already access the new spend and ROI report in Yandex.Direct. It is a good idea, however, to check that the real monetary value of the goal is indicated in Yandex.Metrica . If the value set, i.e. revenue from each goal reached, is arbitrary, then the ROI in the report will likewise be arbitrary.
To open the new report, go to Reports → Standard reports → Sources → Sources, costs, and ROI:
Comparing all the advertising systems you use to attract customers requires a little advance preparation.
Step 1. Add data about costs from different advertising channels
First you need to mark up your advertising traffic. The main tag required is the source, utm_source. You can either stop there, or tag traffic by campaign, creative and keyword:
- utm_сampaign
- utm_medium
- utm_term
- utm_content
The more detailed the markup, the more cross-sections the report will have. Your goals and settings will determine how detailed the statistics are. Given that data in Yandex.Direct is collected automatically, it isn't necessary to mark it up.
Then you should export your costs from the advertising account and transmit them to Yandex.Metrica. You can add them manually, via API or enable a connector — then your data will be prepared and transmitted automatically.
NB: Costs for Yandex.Direct are calculated in Yandex.Metrica without VAT, just like in the Yandex Report Wizard by default. To correctly compare different channels, make sure you transfer data from other systems into Yandex.Metrica without VAT. For a manual upload, you can export the costs as a CSV file from the other advertising account or prepare it using a template. The template only features the columns that are required, but you can add other columns for tags, currency, number of impressions and clicks. A template-based file will be easy to use if you have scripts for data exports. You can find out more about working with templates and preparing data in the Yandex.Metrica help guide.
When the file is ready, all you need to do is upload your costs to Yandex.Metrica:
After that, the data will appear in the report in no more than an hour.
Step 2. Check that revenue data transmits correctly
To calculate ROI correctly, not just costs, but also advertising revenue must be transmitted to Yandex.Metrica correctly. Check what you are already transmitting to Yandex.Metrica, and then choose the most appropriate method:
- Metrics → Goal metrics → Revenue (for one of the goals that revenue is transmitted for)
- Metrics → E-commerce → Revenue
In any case, it is important to transmit revenue data using the real goal value from your site to Yandex.Metrica. Despite the similar name, the priority goals that you set in Yandex.Direct are only taken into account for ROI calculations within Yandex.Direct.
To find out more about which data are suitable as revenue for different business types and how to transmit them to Yandex.Metrica, consult to the Help guide.
Step 3. Compare the ROI of different promotion channels
Open the report Sources → Costs and ROI and add ROI for e-commerce revenue or for the goal that you transmit the value for.
By comparing the ROI of the different sources that bring users to your site, you will be able to see which ads bring the most return for each ruble invested. It's that simple: the higher the ROI, the better the profitability.
When launching new products, our first priority is their usefulness for our advertisers and their businesses, like when we made it possible for them to pay via a CPA model. Advertisers could spend their budget more efficiently by paying directly for the user actions they are looking for. In Yandex.Metrica, we are in the process of creating an accessible end-to-end analytics system, which will allow you to get comprehensive information about the effectiveness of your campaigns. The ROI and ad spend report is a big step in this direction. It will help you quickly identify the channels that pay off best, and use that information to optimally distribute your advertising budget. We will continue adding more features for end-to-end analytics as time goes on.
At this moment in time, it is especially important to use your advertising budget effectively, and this new report will help you place ads with greater impact. We will be grateful for your impressions and feedback of the new features. Good luck with your campaigns!
