I think that each site has one or more statistics services. Our site is no exception, and they are also present on it. After the traffic on the site increased, in parallel with it, the percentage of refusals also increased.
For a long time I observed the following picture:
Agree, the spectacle is so-so. At first, I did not attach much importance to this. But after a while the picture repeated itself, and I began to figure out what was the matter. Using the Webvisor function, I analyzed the activity on my site and noticed a strange thing:
Almost a hundred simultaneous visits from different IP addresses, with zero site browsing time. Here you can immediately guess that these are clearly not people, but bots that spoil the overall picture of statistics. And the task was to filter out such traffic as much as possible.
What have I done?
1. First, I went to and in the "Filters" section set the following parameters:
1.1 Put a check mark on " Ignore my visits».
1.2 Chose a filter with parameters:
Filter type- Leave only traffic;
Field- page URL;
Condition- site and additional addresses.
1.3 I switched the filtering of robots to "Filter robots by strict rules and behavior."
1.4 Saved all settings.
2. Updated the counter code on the site.
One day later I saw a different picture:
That is, thanks to the standard counter settings, I was able to filter out unwanted traffic (excluding bots) and reduced the bounce rate from 92.1 to 25.4. And a day later, the bounce rate hovered around 10.
Yandex.Metrica is an excellent tool that has rich functionality and, most importantly, is constantly updated. However, not everyone knows about some of its useful features or postpones their use on the back burner.
What Metrica functionality often remains unfairly unnoticed? We've compiled the top 10 Metrica settings and tools that it's time to remember and start using them. Go!
10th place. Labels by counters
Not everyone needs this tool. However, if you have multiple lines of business and each has more than one site or landing page, you can use tags to view consolidated reports.
9th place. One click month selection
In my work, I always try to "cheat" (cheat), use hotkeys and so on, which allows me to speed up my work. Therefore, I am always surprised when the month is selected by clicking on the first and last day of the month.
The truth surprises me even more when the choice of the month with one click is not provided by the service, fortunately, Metrica took care of us.
8th place. Filters and operations
The tool is powerful, but you need to be extremely careful with it so as not to mess things up.
Filters are used to cut off non-targeted traffic. I recommend that you immediately check the box "Ignore my visits." In this case, if you are logged in to Yandex with access to the counter and view the site, your visits will not be counted.
If you are going to check the performance of targets, then this checkbox must first be unchecked.
Filters can also be used to cut off users by IP address (both by full and by mask, i.e. 192.168. *. *). You can also exclude from reports views of certain pages by link or page title.
I warn you again: be careful!
Filters have a reverse option "Leave only traffic" that matches the specified conditions. If you specify a specific IP address or page address, then only data from this address or page, respectively, will be taken into account in the reports.
Let's conclude our consideration of filters with "Filtering robots".
The setting accompanying filters is Operations.
Popular use cases:
1. Replace https with http... If your site is accessible via http and https at the same time, use this operation, otherwise your traffic in reports will split in two. Additionally, it is better to immediately redirect to the https-version of the site. At the same time, it is advisable to consult with SEO specialists in advance so as not to lose positions in the search results.
2. Convert to lower case... Another option is when the same page is available at several addresses. To make it clearer, we will give an example with URL addresses and the number of views of these pages: https: //mysite.ru/newevent - 4 https://mysite.ru/NewEvent - 12 https://mysite.ru/newEvent - 7 When viewing a report on on popular pages, you will see these three lines separately, and for accurate calculations, the data must be additionally processed. If you enable the "Convert to lower case" option, the data will be represented in one line: https: //mysite.ru/newevent - 23
You can read more about filters and operations in the help.
7th place. My reports and favorites
There are never too many reports. Each business is individual, and each marketer, analyst, business owner looks at the indicators that interest him.
It is for such cases that reports are saved. How to do it:
1. Customize the report: change the groupings and add your own metrics;
2. In the upper right corner, click the "Save As" button;
3. Enter a relevant title and click "Save";
4. And so that the most important ones are not lost in a large number of reports, add them to your favorites:
All these reports can now be found here:
6th place. Notifications
The larger the organization, the more it costs each hour of downtime for its site. This is especially important for online stores.
Add notifications about the unavailability of your site to mail and in the form of SMS in order to be able to quickly respond to site failures.
5th place. Hide statistically unreliable data
In our work, we often encounter the desire of clients to keep track of everything. The desire is great, but there is one problem: the data collected can be negligible, and it will be incorrect to draw conclusions based on them.
What does Metric have to do with it? The function "Hide statistically unreliable data" speaks for itself.
How does it work?
Methods of mathematical statistics allow you to calculate how many visits are needed so that you can confidently assert (for example, with a 95% probability) that the calculated conversion value differs slightly from the true value (for example, by no more than 5%).
Hi guys! Evgeny Tridchikov is in touch, and in this article I, by tradition, will briefly and without water tell you how to set up Yandex Metrics.
Here are just the basic settings, which are almost always enough to understand what is happening on the site.
I would call this the minimum metric setup requirements.
Let me emphasize that without installing Metrics, this is very bad, because you will not have comprehensive analytics on the work of advertising campaigns. Now let's go.
How to set up Yandex Metrica
Metrica counter settings: basic
- The field "Counter name" is set for yourself, it is logical to indicate the name of the site here.
- The "Site domain" field must contain the site address, ie. second-level domain - in our example site.ru
- The Add Domain button allows you to add sites to collect information from them, ie. cross-domain binding. In this case, the sites must have one counter installed.
- The Time Zone field will sync reports according to your time zone.
- "Time out of a visit to minutes "- sets the maximum duration of the visit.
We press the button "Create counter" and go to the settings.
Metrica setup: "counter code" tab
The "Counter Code" tab contains several check points. Let's take a closer look at them.
- "Webvisor, scrolling map, form analytics" - we must tick the box to enable the corresponding functions in Metrica.
- "Tracking the hash in the address bar of the browser" is relevant for AJAX sites, so we skip it.
- "For XML sites" - respectively, skip.
- "One line" - purely for aesthetes.
- "Prohibition of sending for indexing of site pages" - skip, no comments.
- "Informer" is the name of a block counter that can be placed anywhere on the page. We do not use (why open statistics?).
Thus, copy the contents of the counter and press the save button.
Configuring Metrics: "Webvisor" tab
Webvisor is the most useful thing in Metrica. A tool that records user visits and allows you to view them in the Metrica player. A very cool thing for analytics.
I use the entry "from the browser" and "from anonymous user". See screenshot for settings. More detailed information you can find out about the recording options by clicking on the question mark icons.
Metrica setup: goals tab
Setting goals is a topic for a separate article, so I will pay special attention to this and prepare a detailed post on this topic in a couple of days. I will only mention that at least one goal should be configured, because the essence of analytics is the study of user experience on the way to our goal. For now, let's skip.
Configuring Metrics: Filters Tab
On the Filters tab, you can set the limit for incoming traffic, as well as transform it using the Operations tool.
For example, I know that visits to my site (when I go to the site's admin panel or any other site administrator does it) come from links that contain the word admin. That is, if the URL (link) contains this word (admin), we can conclude that the site is an administrator. Why record his visits? After all, we only need new and unique users in the reports, it makes no sense to overload them with our own visits.
Therefore, I boldly set up a filter for visits whose URL contains "admin", put a checkmark "Do not take into account my visits", and also a checkbox opposite to "filter robots only according to strict rules". Click the "Save" button.
Metrica setup: "notifications" tab
Here you can set the rules for receiving notifications about Metrica's work. I think there will be no questions, everything is very clear.
Likewise with the "Access" tab.
Summary
That's it, this completes the basic setup of Yandex Metrica. it step-by-step instruction suitable for all beginners. It remains to stick the counter code in front of the closing tag and start getting statistics.
If I forgot to tell you something about how to install Yandex Metrica - please do not hesitate to ask questions in the comments. Have a nice day!
Surely you already know that the Metrica counter must be installed on the site to track business indicators: traffic sources, time on the site, viewing depth, conversion, etc. This opens up opportunities for in-depth analysis of the resource's performance and timely adjustments. The big plus is that the absolutely free counter provides extensive statistics.
However, for correct operation, it is important not only to install it, but also to configure it correctly. How to do this, and we will tell you in the article below.
Setting up a counter and goals in Yandex.Metrica
First of all, you need to create an account in Yandex (or log in to an existing one) and go to the page of the service itself.
For new users, the "Counters" menu is automatically selected on this page, in which one should click on the "Add counter" button:
Important! The counter is a representation of the site inside the Metrica, i.e. the place where all data about the site will be stored. If you have several sites, then for each site you need to create a separate counter so that statistics are collected and displayed correctly. Otherwise, the data will be mixed.
After clicking on the "Add counter" button, we see the following form:
We fill in the form fields:
- Counter name- it is most convenient to indicate the name of the site, so that later you do not get confused when creating other counters.
- Website address- we indicate the URL of the site.
- Additional addresses- if you want to collect general data for several sites, then add them here.
- Timezone- select the time zone of the region in which your company operates.
- Currency- we indicate the currency in which we want to see the data about the goods.
- Visit timeout in minutes- the time of inactivity of the visitor on the site, after which the visit will be considered completed (for example, the person opened your site, and then went to the kitchen and forgot that he was working at the computer, the visit is running, but there is no visit in fact). Better to leave the default.
As a result, it will turn out like this:
The tab is selected automatically and on it we see a list of parameters:
We select the item "Webvisor, scrolling map, form analytics", which will give us access to the maps and the webvisor. Other options are very specific and you may never need them, so you can read about them in Yandex Help.
Scroll down the page and be sure to click on the "Save" button.
Below we see the code of our counter, which must be placed on all pages of the site in HTML code (preferably at the beginning of the tag
):
Important! Each time you make changes to the counter settings on this tab, you must click the "Save" button and then replace the counter code on the website.
We set the checkbox “Ignore my visits” to collect cleaner data on your visitors, without taking into account your activity on the site, and click on the “Save” button.
If you do not select this filter, then the reports will most likely have high bounce rates for direct visits, or, conversely, the indicators “time on site” or “number of viewed pages” will be too high. Don't think that your visits can add statistics. Owners interact with the site in a slightly different way than customers.
For the item "Filtering robots" it is better to leave the parameter by default.
To receive notifications about the availability of the site, we recommend that you specify your mail or phone number, where reports will be sent.
Ready! The basic settings of the counter are completed and its code can be installed on the site.
Important! For correct data collection, the code must be on every page of the site. The code starts collecting data as soon as it is added to the site.
Objectives Tab
The goal is configured for a specific user action on the site, for example, visiting a page, clicking a button, downloading a file, etc. The main thing is to track those actions that benefit your business.
Note that there is no standard set of goals. Everything is individual and depends on the tasks that you set for the site. Now we will consider the main types of goals, from which you can choose the appropriate option.
You can add, edit, or delete goals at any time, but we recommend setting them up right away for all conversion elements and / or pages. This will avoid future data shortages.
There are 4 types of goals available in Metric, which you can find in the "Goals" tab (click on the "Add goal" button):
- Visiting pages is the default target. Allows you to track the number of visitors for one or a set of pages (up to 10). You can also analyze transitions to external sites or file downloads.
For example, we want to know how many users visit the contact page:. For this:
- We indicate the name of the goal "Visiting the contact page" that is understandable to us. Write detailed names so that later it will be easier to remember what the goal was created for.
- Then, in the "Condition" field, select "url: contains" and on the right, specify the full page address. If we have a section with a contact page divided into subsections and we do not want to collect data on subsections, it is better to select the "url: matches" parameter.
- Save the target by clicking on the "Add target" button.
At first glance, the goal is simple, but works great for events such as:
- Visit the order confirmation page (for an online store) or registration.
- Downloading a file (for example, a price list or presentation).
- Visit a page with information for partners or a list of dealers.
- Add a comment or feedback.
- Visiting the page with confirmation of the subscription to the newsletter, etc.
You can customize this target without the help of a programmer. But because of the link to the page address, this variant of the goal is not suitable for non-unique pages.
- Number of views- this goal allows you to select those users who have viewed the specified number of pages. Needed to assess the depth of site browsing.
For example, let's specify 5 pages to track the number of users who viewed 5 or more pages on the site. Do not forget to indicate the name of the target and click on the "Add target" button.
- JavaScript event- a goal that allows you to track the execution of events: clicking on a button, filling out a form, watching a video, etc. To set a goal, a unique parameter is specified in the “Target ID” field, which is called in the element code on the site using the “reachGoal” function.
For example, we would like to track the number of clicks on the button "Get expert advice" for the audit sales page, and therefore we specify the sovet parameter as follows:
Then, in order for the data about the goal to be counted, on the site in the element code, you need to add a function with our parameter:
yaCounter12345678.reachGoal ("sovet"), where 12345678 is your counter number, which is listed at the top of the Metrics page:
Important! For each element, the identifier must be unique and match the corresponding parameter in the site code. Identifiers should not contain the same words as in the page address, as well as special characters: /, &, #,?, =.
The downside is that if you don't know how to make changes to the code of your site, you will have to involve an appropriate specialist (which may take time). But on the other hand, this goal is not tied to the page address, it allows you to track several actions on one page.
- Composite goal- suitable for tracking a sequence of actions. Most often they are used to analyze the process of ordering a product or ordering a service.
For example, to order a product, let's draw up an approximate order of steps:
- Go to the cart page - url: starts with https://site.ru/cart
- Filling out the order form - zakaz identifier
- Go to the order confirmation page - url: matches https://site.ru/success
The name and number of steps may vary depending on the site. For this purpose, we recommend that you specify a name for each step; for identifiers, you need to add the appropriate functions to the site code.
In Metrica, the form is filled in as follows:
This goal is like a kind of constructor, where each step is a goal of the form "Page visit" or "JavaScript event". In the reports, you can also see the data separately for each step. The maximum number of steps is 5, so if the process is performed on your site in more stages, then it is worth breaking it down into several composite goals.
Important! The steps must be connected and executed in a row: if it is possible to complete the third step, bypassing the second, then such a sequence will not be counted. In this case, you will have to create a separate goal for each scenario.
In general, when setting goals, it is worth knowing about the following features:
- A maximum of 200 targets can be created for one counter.
- When the target is changed, the accumulated data is not recalculated.
- When you delete a target, the data is not saved.
Goal report
General conversion data for all configured goals is available in the Conversions report.
And the results will look like this:
Each goal can be “revealed” for a more detailed analysis of the information.
The composite target will look like this:
If you click on the funnel sign next to the name,
you can get a step-by-step report in the form of a funnel:
Such reports will help to understand at what step users have difficulties and they leave. Having found out which step is the most problematic, it is worth moving on to the analysis of Webvisor's records.
Conclusion
Now you know how to create a counter and set up goals in Metrica. Thanks to the counter, you will be able to receive more accurate information about the actions of your users on the site and understand exactly where to make changes on the site.
To consolidate the information, we also recommend reading our book “Business Analytics. Not a step without Yandex.Metrica ”and watch the webinar.
If you have any difficulties or would like to delegate the setting of the meter to specialists, you can
When SEO grows out of short pants, he begins to open Metrics and Analytics not only in order to ... hmm, admire beautifully growing charts. Complex data segmentation, detailed analysis of entry points and conversions comes to the fore. In short, advanced features. If you use a statistics system specifically for serious analytics, then you hardly need to prove how important the accuracy of the initial data is.
I'll tell you about a few simple techniques for increasing the correctness of statistics.
1. Set the counter as high as possible in the code
The position of the counter is really very important. If you put it at the end of the code, the system will not count visitors who leave the site without waiting for it to fully load. This will rob you of valuable failure data and prevent you from fighting it.
In addition, the distortion can be very high. I am familiar with the case when Analytics and Metrica installed in different places returned the number of visitors that differed by more than two times (by the way, if you see a similar problem in yourself, check the speed of the site).
2. We filter users who are not in the target audience
The director opens the meeting.
- How many people visited our site yesterday?
- So. Our company has 43 employees. What bastard didn't come in?
Jokes aside, and on poorly visited sites, the project team can seriously affect the statistics.
To avoid this, go to the counter settings - Filters and:
- We put the checkbox "Ignore my visits."
- Add a filter by ip of employees working on the site.
If there are many remote workers working on the site, IP filtering can be inconvenient. There is no ideal solution for such a case, as an option, you can oblige employees to enter the site only by a link with a tag like “utm_source = corporate”. Or make it so that everyone visits the link with a parameter once, add a cookie, and then track the visit of visitors with this cookie through a JavaScript event target.
We do not close the "Filters" page, it is also needed for the following items.
3. Filtering robots
We set the option "filter robots according to strict rules and behavior" (the most stringent option). After the settings take effect, the total amount of displayed traffic on the site can seriously decrease. Consider this if the site is not yours, but a client's.
For customers who do not have extensive experience in Internet marketing, it is often extremely difficult to prove that it is not the number of visitors as such that matters, but the customers that the site brings. It would seem that representatives of real business, coming to the Internet, should take care of orders / purchases first of all. This is not always the case: the magic of growing charts is addictive.
4. We accept data only from our own domains
This week, many of our users noticed the appearance of page views from domains that have nothing to do with the counter in Metrica (Popular, Webvisor) reports.
From a technical point of view, nothing is impossible in such a situation: it was spam. Yes, along with mail and search spam, such "statistics spam" also exists. We have localized the source of this spam and blocked it.
Why does Metrica accept hits from other domains? This is done for the convenience of users: very often the owners of the counters do not indicate the site address in the settings. Or, having installed the tracking code on another site, they forget to register it as a mirror. If Metrica did not take into account views from such unspecified sites by default, this would create unnecessary inconvenience.
Each user can turn on the filtering himself, which prohibits Metrika from counting views from any other sites. To do this, you need to specify the site address and all necessary mirrors in the counter settings, and then in the "Filters" section of the counter settings add the filtering rule "Leave only traffic - page URL - site and mirrors".
Unfortunately, this way you will not be able to block all refspam (invalid referrals from "left" sites). I consider banning sites that "foul" the statistics of referrals to htacess as an irrational waste of resources (the list of domains is constantly changing), if necessary, it is easier to create and save segments that cut off refspam in the Metrica itself.
5. Struggling with "internal transitions"
I think everyone saw the traffic source "internal referrals" in the reports. In reality, Metrica registers visitors who have spent a long time on the site: one visit is split into several, and the true source is shown only for the first visit.
If internal transitions bother you, then most of them can be easily removed by attaching them to 1 visit. Quote from help:
The visit is completed if some time has passed between the actions of the visitor on the site. The default is 30 minutes. You can specify a different time using the visit timeout option.
For example, the timeout is 30 minutes. The visitor has entered the site and viewed several pages - the visit is valid. Then I left the browser tab open and walked away. After 35 minutes, I came back (timeout period expired) and went to another page of the site. This viewing is considered a new visit.
Thus, to get rid of internal transitions, you need to go to the counter settings (tab "General") and specify a timeout, for example, 360 minutes.
Attention: do not change the timeout just like that, "just in case." First, make sure that changing the rules for calculating the number of visits does not distort the results of regularly monitored metrics or experiments. The total number of displayed visits will decrease, the viewing depth will increase slightly, keep this in mind.
For a number of purposes, it will be quite sufficient to simply remove the internal transitions using the appropriate segment.
For example (clickable):
Of course, you can filter in other ways as well. In my opinion, this is what Metrica is good for - it provides a lot of alternative ways to quickly build any reports, and in the nuances by which they differ, you can find very valuable data. He who has a head, let him find it!
