There are many tools that we can use to make web measurement of our site. One of them is the one offered by the Russian search engine Yandex (Яндекс). This company operates the largest search engine in Russia with a market share of about 60% in that country, developing a large number of services and products for the internet.
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Yandex
The
Yandex
search engine is ranked as the fourth largest search engine worldwide, with more than 150 million searches per day and more than 50.5 million daily visitors, according to Comscore. Yandex also has a large presence in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, providing almost a third of all search results in those markets and 43% of all search results in Belarus.
Yandex Metrica
The most popular homepage in Russia has a free tool to do web analysis, as does Google, called Yandex Metrica. Using it is very simple, you just have to register with a user account in Yandex and then create an accountant for the web. The code provided by the page is inserted into the HTML code of the site to be analyzed and, as with Google Analytics, it is recommended to do it as high as possible so that the measurement is more accurate. Data collection will begin automatically. If the site is WordPress, you can use a plugin to use Yandex Metrica.
With this tool, you can view from the actions of individual users, to collect ad statistics or view conversion rates. In some respects it works better than Google Analytics, for example it stops counting as a bounce when a user exceeds 15 seconds on a page, not 30, making its analysis much more accurate in that aspect.
Compared to other measurement tools, Yandex Metrica provides more information in some fields. An example of this is that with Google Analytics you do not know what the user does once he has entered a page or when he leaves, but with Yandex see the behavior of this through its WebVisor technology, with which you can recreate each action of the user, since it records them. Thus, it can be observed if problems arise in navigation and the reason that leads them to make each movement on the site.
4. Yandex Metrica Options
Yandex offers us a lot of options to see the user’s behavior on the page:
- Click map: The click map measures and displays statistics of clicks made on the site. This helps us evaluate the overall usability of a website, identify the most popular sections, and see if there are sections that users mistake for links. Elements are color-coded to indicate how often they are used. This way you can see the total number of clicks on a page or the percentage of clicks in a certain area. Several map display modes can be used:
- Heat map – Warm colors correspond to the most frequent clicks, and cold colors correspond to areas where you click a few times.
- Monochrome map – The denser the color, the higher the click frequency.
- Clicks on links and buttons – The map only shows clicks on links and buttons. It does not show clicks on other items.
- Transparency map – The map is displayed as through a “fog curtain”: the elements where it is clicked most frequently are most visible through the “fog”.
- Element Map – The map displays all the elements on a page.
- Map of links: This is a tool that analyzes the statistics of clicks on links of a site, showing with different colors the links depending on their popularity. This way you can see the number of times a link has been clicked or its percentage.
- Scroll map: The scroll map analyzes how site users pay attention to certain areas of the page. This information can help you better select the length of the page and optimally sort important information. The map shows the total time the user spends viewing the page and the average time for a specific part of the page. In addition, several display modes can be used, either through a heat map where changes in display time are displayed by colors, or by a transparency map, where areas of the page where the user spent less viewing time are indicated more darkly.
- Form analysis: This tool is designed for sites that actively use forms, helping to understand how site users interact with them. Form analysis is available in two types of data visualization:
- The form conversion rate,which allows you to view:
- The number of times the page containing the form has been viewed.
- The number of interactions with the form.
- The number of forms submitted.
- The form fields,which contain the following information:
- The time spent interacting with each field in the form.
- The empty fields on the form.
- Fields that users do not complete before leaving the page without submitting it (that is, fields that cause difficulties when filling them).
- The form conversion rate,which allows you to view:
5. Custom reports
The reports offered by Yandex Metrica are very easy to understand and customizable and you can also interact with them in case you want to investigate more in some aspect. In addition, the filters and actions are very simple to configure. The tool also allows us to compare the activity of different audiences across segments.
6. Conclusion
Each analysis tool has its characteristics that work better or worse than others, so it is always advisable to combine them and get the most accurate results of each measurement. In this framework, Yandex Metrica’s user session recording and heat maps are perfect for knowing exactly how the user moves within a site.
