It was about time that Yandex came out with an answer to Google Analytics. Metrika, the analytics system provided by Yandex, has been around since 2007 yet was only available to Yandex advertisers. In Russian, “metrica” means “metrics” – really not a bad way to synonymize “analytics”. And now Yandex Metrica is available to all webmasters and website owners. The signup process is very simple and fast and the tracking code that needs to be placed on every page of the website looks somewhat similar to that of Google Analytics. Here’s how Metrika’s tracking code looks:
<!– YaMetrics begin –> <script type=”text/javascript”><!– var ya_cid=154367; //–></script> <script src=”http://bs.yandex.ru/resource/watch.js” type=”text/javascript”></script> <noscript><div style=”display: inline;”><img src=”http://bs.yandex.ru/watch/154367″ width=”1″ height=”1″ alt=”"></div></noscript> <!– YaMetrics end –>
Similarly to Google Analytics, Metrica measures traffic and user behavior and it is fully integrated with Yandex advertising campaigns, allowing marketers to connect two sets of datain one view.
Here’s a screenshot of Metrica’s user interface:
yandex-metrica
Now, after the tracking code has made it on to every page of your website, you can start tracking goals, such as a page visit. Here’s how a sample website visitor report looks:
yandex-metrica-visitors-report
Yandex Metrica is intended as a business solution to control the efficiency of pay-per-click campaigns and a tool that is meant to help advertisers optimize and make smarter decisions. The cool part about it is that Metrica is updated every 5 minutes so you get almost real-time data to work with. However, the drawback is the same as with Google Analytics: there’s no way to back track, meaning that you are only able to track what you have thought of tracking.
