Why Metrica at all
A site without analytics is like a shop without a till: people seem to walk around, but what they buy and why they leave is unknown. Yandex Metrica answers, for free, the questions: where visitors come from, what they do on the site, where they abandon the cart and which ads pay off versus which burn the budget.
Installing the counter: 15 minutes
- Go to metrika.yandex.ru, create a counter, specify the domain.
- Copy the code and place it on all pages before the closing
</head>— by hand, via Google Tag Manager or a CMS plugin. - Enable Session Replay, the click map and the accurate bounce rate — checkboxes in the settings.
- Verify: in the “Counter check” section, or just visit your site and look at the “Visitors online” report.
Goals — the most important thing everyone skips
Without goals, Metrica shows traffic but not the business result. A goal is the action the site exists for:
- submitting a request form;
- clicking the phone or WhatsApp;
- placing an order;
- visiting the “Thank you” page.
They’re set up in “Settings → Goals”. Simple ones (a page visit, a button click) — without a developer. Composite ones, like a cart funnel, are better left to a developer. The rule: 3–5 main goals, not thirty — otherwise the reports turn into mush.
Session Replay: watching over visitors
Session Replay records people’s actions on the site: mouse movement, scrolls, clicks. It’s legal (the data is anonymized) and terribly useful: in an evening of watching recordings you’ll learn more about your site than in a year of guessing. Typical findings: people click a non-clickable image, don’t notice a button, abandon the form at the “Patronymic” field.
Alongside it — the click map and the scroll map: how far down the page people even get. If your main offer sits where 10% scroll to, you’re showing it to one in ten.
Five reports for a business owner
- Sources, summary — where the traffic is from: search, ads, social media, direct visits. Look at it together with goal conversions, not bare visits.
- Conversions — how many requests and for which goal. The main report.
- Direct, costs — if you run ads: how much a request costs per campaign.
- Entry pages — which pages people enter through from search. These pages should be cherished and improved first.
- Technologies → Devices — if 70% of traffic is from phones and conversion there is three times lower than desktop, you have a problem with the mobile version.
Common mistakes
- The counter isn’t on all pages — the data lies.
- Two counters duplicate each other after a change of contractor.
- Goals aren’t set up, decisions are made by “visits”.
- Your own visits aren’t filtered out — the office inflates its own statistics.
- Reports are looked at once a year before a meeting.
Takeaway
Metrica is a free X-ray of the site. The minimal set: the counter on all pages, 3–5 goals, Session Replay on, and a weekly glance at conversions and sources. We’ll set up analytics turnkey and teach you to read the reports — write to us.
