Yandex Metrica: evaluate your ad performance

The more users buy a product or order a service after clicking on an ad, the greater the profit for your business. That's why it's important to know which actions that website visitors take lead to purchases, and how to make your ads in Yandex Direct work towards these actions.

Yandex Metrica lets you learn how website users behave, set goals (user actions that are important to you), and track conversions (sessions fulfilling these goals). Yandex Metrica reports can also help you explore your site's audience and evaluate the quality of your site and its usability.

  1. Why Yandex Metrica is important for advertising in Yandex Direct
  2. How to start collecting statistics
  3. Access to goals without access to the tag
  4. How to analyze statistics
  5. How to set up a campaign based on website audience data
  6. How to identify shortcomings of your website
  7. Have questions?

Why Yandex Metrica is important for advertising in Yandex Direct

You can use Yandex Metrica data to increase your return on advertising

After you set up your goals in Yandex Metrica, you can switch to an automatic strategy. For example, the Maximize conversions strategy lets you get the maximum number of conversions and bring the average weekly CPA closer to the value you set. Learn more about strategies

If you manage your bids manually, Yandex Direct can automatically raise or lower bids depending on the forecasted conversion probability. By setting up priority goals for your campaign, you help Yandex Direct predict conversions more accurately. Learn more about priority goals

Yandex Metrica in ad settings is helpful

Yandex Metrica lets you collect data about a site's audience. This data helps you more accurately target your ads, create more attractive ads, and optimize your campaign settings.

How to set up a campaign based on website audience data

Site statistics in Yandex Metrica help you improve this

Your campaign success also depends on the quality of your website. Even if an ad brings a lot of impressions and clicks, you can make it more profitable by analyzing your website statistics and improving its usability.

How to identify shortcomings of your website

How to start collecting statistics

Step 1. Create a Yandex Metrica tag and install it on your site

The Yandex Metrica tag is the code included in the content of your website pages. Create a tag and install it your website as close as possible to the top of the page so that it collects the most complete data.

To learn more about creating tags, see Yandex Metrica Help.

Step 2. Create goals for the tag

Specify the visitor actions you're interested in as goals. We recommend creating several goals that correspond to different levels of user engagement, for example:

  • For online stores — “Viewed 2 or more products”, “Added an item to the cart”, “Placed an order”.
    Tip. To get detailed information about each order, set up e-commerce data collection.
  • For a site offering services — “Viewed 3 or more pages”, “Visited the services catalog”, “Clicked ‘Call Me’, “Submitted an online request”.

To learn more about creating goals, see Yandex Metrica Help.

Step 3. Link Yandex Metrica to Yandex Direct

Fill out the Metrica tags field in your ad campaign settings in Yandex Direct.

If you create lots of campaigns with an identical set of tags, you can enter their ID in the Metrica tags for new campaigns field on the user settings page.

A yclid label with a unique click number is automatically added to all links in your ads. Make sure that your site correctly opens links containing tags. After a user clicks on your ad, the Metrica tag on your site will track the tag and link the session with a specific click.

How tagging links works

A yclid tag with a unique click number is automatically added to the click-through link for your ad, for example:

http://site.ru/?yclid=123456

If clicking through on a yclid tag returns an error, configure your site to use arbitrary URL parameters. If you use redirects, please check that the yclid tag redirects to the destination URL.

Access to goals without access to the tag

If there are people who help you manage your ad campaigns in Yandex Direct, like an agency or a setup expert, you can choose to give them access only to the goals on the tag for your website. In this case, these users will be able to use them to optimize ad campaigns without having access to the Yandex Metrica tag. To do this, go to Yandex Metrica, open the Goals page, and enable the Allow optimizing campaigns for goals without access to the tag option. If you created the tag recently, the option is enabled by default.

When you create a campaign, information about the Yandex Metrica tags installed on the website is automatically shown in the relevant field. If you are setting up an ad but don't have access to the necessary tags, the system will suggest requesting access to goals on these tags. To do so, click Request access. Please note that you won't have access to all tag statistics. Only the part of these statistics that is necessary to run ad campaigns will be available to you:

  • Data on goals will be collected only for the launched campaign. That's why you won't be able to use the data obtained during campaigns run on other accounts. The statistics will only contain the data obtained during the ad campaign where the goals were used.

  • Transferring income data from Yandex Metrica to Yandex Direct won't be available. E-commerce goals can be used for optimization. In the Maximum conversions strategy limited by cost-revenue ratio (CRR), specify the conversions and set their value.

  • You can't set up retargeting lists for such goals.

  • Hints in the interface like the number of conversions over the past period or CPA recommendations won't be available.

How to analyze statistics

Review your Yandex Metrica reports for Yandex Direct. The Yandex Direct, summary report provides traffic statistics for ads, keywords, and search queries, and the Yandex Direct, costs report provides cost statistics for them.

For example, if the Yandex Direct, summary report shows a high bounce rate after clicking one of the ads, this might mean that users cannot find the advertised product on the landing page. You can prevent bounces by editing your ad or landing page.

In each report, you can select a goal and see its conversion statistics. From the Yandex Direct, summary report, you can learn which ads are more likely to lead to your goal, while from the Yandex Direct, costs report, you can learn how much you spend on these clicks. Reallocate your budget in favor of better performing ads and keywords to get more conversions.

Note. The Yandex Direct data for generating Yandex Metrica reports is received by Yandex Metrica within a few hours.

How to set up a campaign based on website audience data

Ads are more effective when they address a specific target audience. Know your visitors to target your ads better.

Contact your visitors again

You can display ads for people who already interacted with your site. For example, users who looked at three or more products but didn't make a purchase can be suggested a broader selection of products in the category they're interested in. To do this, create a retargeting list based on Yandex Metrica goals and segments. Learn more about retargeting

Adapt your ads to your audience

Yandex Metrica gives you a deeper insight into your audience with the Long-term interests, Geography, Gender, and Age reports. When you select a goal, you can see the characteristics of users who reach the goal more often. You can set up bid adjustments to increase the number of such users, and write separate ad texts for them. Learn more about bid adjustments

Find out how visitors go to your site
For example, see the Search query report: you can add the most effective queries to your campaign keywords.

How to identify shortcomings of your website

Check your website performance on different devices and browsers

If the website loads slowly or fails to adapt to screen size, mobile users bounce out. You can compare bounce rates and page depth for desktops, smartphones, and tablets (in the Devices report), and for different browsers (in the Browsers report). You can analyze website performance using the Page load time report (you can also group it by device).

Evaluate user interaction with the website
  • Identify the landing pages that often bounce visitors back from the website: see the bounce rate in the report Content → Landing pages.
  • Create a multi-step goal: define the sequence of steps the user takes on their purchase path. In the Conversions report, you see which step you lose your customers at most often.
  • Find out what difficulties the users have: use Session Replay to select sessions with product views without purchases and replay the sessions.
  • Additionally evaluate your website navigation using the maps of clicks, links, and scrolling.
  • Use the Form analysis tool to test how your forms work: you will find out on which field of your form the users usually drop the form.
Tip. For more information about checking website usability, see the guides for the desktop version and mobile version.

Have questions?

Attention. Our customer service can help you with the campaigns created under the same login that you use to contact us. You can see your current login in the upper-right corner of the screen. Our team can access your data only when processing your request.

You can contact us from 10:00 to 19:00 (UTC+3) by phone:

Moscow: +7 (495) 780-65-20

Russian regions: 8 (800) 700-47-45 (toll-free within Russia)

Attention.

To access campaigns, the customer service specialist will need your PIN.