Yandex Metrica — The SEO Tool You Should Start Using Now

In a Google-ruled world, not a lot of people have given a thought about Yandex. But while ranking in that search engine would be pointless for SEOs working anywhere outside Russia, Yandex has some excellent pieces of tools which really come in handy. That is the case with Yandex Metrica.

To be honest, Yandex Metrica is the equivalent of Google Analytics and as such, it offers pretty much the same basic features. But alongside that, the team behind Yandex Metrica have come up with a couple of unique features which will make it your next favourite SEO tool (and it’s free!).

WebVisor — The real way to measure user engagement

What fascinates me most about Yandex Metrica and was the reason for me to share my experience with the tool is the WebVisor. It is essentially a session recorder which allows you to have a look at pretty much everything that is happening on your website, down to the last detail. The session replay does not only allow you to see every interaction of users with your site, but displays them exactly the way they happened.

You can even see clicks and keystrokes, which kind of makes it the ultimate SEO monitoring tool … Nevertheless, you can turn off the recording of keystrokes for specific fields which is a nice addition for reasons that are obvious.

Speaking from experience, seeing how people are hitting that CTRL+C on your entire page feels kinda odd but, on the other hand, you are prepared and are actively seeking for solutions before the negative impact hits.

Now seriously, the WebVisor functionality comes quite in handy when having to analyse user behavior. Working your way around an issue with your site becomes much, much easier because you can actually see how users behave and interact with your website.

That way, the recorded user session can show you problems or specific shortcomings of your site’s navigation as well as to reveal issues users encounter with certain pages that you have never thought existed.

So how does the WebVisor work?

What I like about Yandex Metrica as a whole is that the interface is pretty intuitive and the entire tool is very easy to navigate around. When you get to the WebVisor dashboard, there are some useful filters right up there, ready to be put in use. And with thousands of visits per day in some instances, being able to filter the recordings and analyse certain sets is just what you need.

What’s more, the information collected about each session is extremely detailed which allows for huge precision. You also have the proper filters to put that information in use.

Sessions Filters (Sessions in which … )

Along the usual session recording filters like source, geography, behavior, and technology which webmasters are familiar with, there are a few additional filter groups which I find truly useful — history, sessions replay, and e-commerce. And inside these groups you can find the following:

• History — new vs returning visitors; session number; time since first session, time since previous session, date of previous visit, avg. time between sessions
• Sessions replay — viewed [sessions]; favourite [sessions]; activity; phrase
• E-commerce — item category; item ID; item name

But the four “usual” session group filters I just mentioned — source, geography, behavior, and technology also have some hidden gems worth exploring more in depth.

Take the “source” filter for instance. You can sift recorded sessions by keyword and analyse the behaviour of users who’ve come to your website through a certain keyphrase. I also find the bounce rate filter option extremely helpful, but really, the filter structure you have access to is so comprehensive that to get a real idea of the full scale you’ve got to try it yourself and experiment.

Users Filters (for people with …)

Here you also have quite the arsenal of filters which make the detailed breakdown and analysis of specific user behavior very easy to set up and at the same time — genuinely thorough.

• [User] characteristics — gender, age, percentage of robots, geography, interests, date of first visit, days on site, user parameters
• [User] metrics — number of visits, number of pageviews, total time on site
• [User] sources — first traffic source, one of the traffic sources
• [User] technology — device, OS, browsers, browser technology, IP, Resolution
• [User] behaviour — landing page, view URL, session parameters, file download, external click-through, date of visit
• [User] e-commerce — items viewed, number of purchases, items purchased, total revenue, product view, product view from category, item purchase, product purchase from category

And that’s the tip of the iceberg since a lot of the filters listed can be expanded thus allowing you to choose a subfilter. And again, you can refine the data set as much as you like, giving you a pretty good idea of what is happening on your website.

What does the filtered data look like?

The recorded sessions in the WebVisor’s dashboard are organised pretty neatly as well, which is also a huge plus in my book. With a few exceptions, I’ve rarely seen an SEO tool where the information is arranged so tidily and you’re ready to jump to the real work right from the get-go.

What you see here is a screenshot from my dashboard. For this example I’ve filtered all direct traffic sessions and as you can see, everything looks quite nicely. You have the recorded sessions with a play button next to them, followed by a few icons — traffic source (direct traffic in my case), country of origin, OS, and browser type.

The other default data you get in your dashboard is the “activity” that a user registered on your site (an engagement metric that the tool calculates), time spent on site, number pageviews, referral from site (displays the name of website that sends you the referral traffic along with its fav icon), sessions number, and the location of the user.

So there you have it, just click the “play” button and see what users do while you’re not looking ...

The New & Improved Metrica - Coming Soon

Now more good news. In January the guys at Yandex announced in a blog post that a new and improved WebVisor 2.0 was soon coming out. A beta testing signup is now under way, so if you’re interested, you can be one of the first to try the 2.0.

The new features of WebVisor 2.0 include more accurate recording of dynamically-changing pages and plugin content. Right now, the WebVisor tool can’t record the content that’s displayed in third-party plugins, however, 2.0 will build on that and you’ll be able to analyse the impact of such content.

The team behind Metrica also announced some valuable additions to the mobile traffic recordings, like the proper sessions display when a device is rotated. Personally, I’m looking forward to that one.

A few final words

To sum it all up, in my experience, Yandex Metrica has proven itself to be extremely advantageous and has helped me and my team significantly improve on how we built and optimize our websites. That way, Metrica has become an integral part of my arsenal of SEO tools. Without a doubt, you will find it to be useful as well, so give it a shot!

And if I’ve already sold you on using Yandex Metrica, the setup & implementation is pretty easy. All you need to know is covered here, although, I seriously doubt you’ll need to read it since the setup is also made to be very easy.

If you have experience with the tool, want to share something you’ve come across, or just have a question, I am always ready to learn or help you out.