Self-installation of the Yandex.Metrica counter and setting up statistics yourself. “Zero” visits, or How I reduced the bounce rate in Yandex.Metrica Do not count my visits

Hello guys! Evgeniy Tridchikov is in touch and in this article, as per tradition, I will briefly and straightforwardly tell you how to set up Yandex Metrica.

Here are the basic settings, which are almost always enough to understand what is happening on the site.
I would call these the minimum requirements for setting up Metrica.

Let me emphasize that without installing Metrics, this is very bad, because you will not have comprehensive analytics on the performance of advertising campaigns. Now let's go.

How to set up Yandex Metrica

Metrics counter settings: basic

• The “Counter Name” field is set for yourself; it is logical to indicate the name of the site here.
• The “Site Domain” field must contain the website address, i.e. second level domain - in our example site.ru
• The “Add domain” button allows you to add sites to collect information from them, i.e. cross-domain binding. In this case, one counter must be installed at the sites.
• The Time Zone field synchronizes reports according to your time zone.
• "Time out visit to minutes”—sets the maximum duration of the visit.

Click the “Create counter” button and go to the settings.

Setting up Metrics: “counter code” tab

The “Counter Code” tab contains several checkpoints. Let's look at them in more detail.

• “Webvisor, scroll map, form analytics” - check the box to enable the corresponding functions in Metrica.
• “Hash tracking in the browser address bar” is relevant for AJAX sites, so we’ll skip it.
• “For XML sites” - accordingly, we skip it.
• “In one line” is purely for aesthetes.
• “Prohibition of sending site pages for indexing” - skip, no comments.
• “Informer” is the name of a block counter that can be placed anywhere on the page. We don’t use it (why open statistics?).

Thus, we copy the contents of the counter and click the save button.

Setting up 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 Metrics player. A very cool thing for analytics.

I'm using the "from browser" and "from anonymous user" entries. See the settings in the screenshot. You can find out more detailed information about recording options by clicking on the question mark icons.

Setting up Metrics: “goals” tab

Setting goals is a topic for a separate article, so I will pay special attention to this and will prepare a detailed post on this topic in a couple of days. I’ll just say that at least one goal should be configured, because the essence of analytics is studying user experience on the way to our goal. Let's skip it for now.

Setting up Metrics: “filters” tab

On the "Filters" tab, you can set a limit on incoming traffic, and also convert it using the "Operations" tool.

For example, I know that visits to my site (when I log into the site admin area or when any other site administrator does this) occur via links that contain the word admin. That is, if the URL (link) contains this word (admin), we can conclude that there is an administrator on the site. Why record his visits? After all, we only need new and unique users in our 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”, check the “Do not take into account my visits” checkbox, as well as the checkbox next to “filter robots only according to strict rules”. Click the “Save” button.

Setting up Metrics: “notifications” tab

Here you can set rules for receiving notifications about Metrica work. I think there will be no questions, everything is very clear.

Same with the “Access” tab.

Resume

That's it, the basic setup of Yandex Metrics is complete. This step-by-step instruction is suitable for all beginners. All that remains is to insert the counter code before 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 good day!

To fully assess the impact of your website, you need to get the most accurate analytical results possible. Let's take conversion as an example.

Let's say a hundred users come to you every day, which you will find out using metric data. This is three thousand users per month. Of these, 450 people ordered the product. We calculate conversion by dividing users who performed the target action by the total number of visitors and multiplying by 100%. That is, 450:3000*100%, that’s 15%. However, you are also among the total number of visitors, because you also visit the site to check its performance. Therefore, the numbers you calculated earlier will not be absolutely correct.

That is, to correctly calculate conversion, you need to subtract the visits that you and your employees make, that is, not the target audience. Let's say there are 400 such visits in total. Then we calculate: 450/(3000-400)*100% = 17%. That is, we cut off non-targeted visits and got a real conversion.

In order to exclude your own visits, you can cut them off from the general data. There is a special opportunity for this. Let's take a closer look at this functionality.

We cut off unnecessary visits to Yandex. Metrics

First, you need to log in and go to the main page of the counter we need. Click “Settings”.

Now go to the “Filters” section.

Your visits will not be displayed, you just need to check the box next to “Do not count my visits.” For the changes to take effect, click the “Save” button.

The operation associated with excluding your visits is tied to cookies stored in the service’s memory. Now Yandex. The metric will not count you as a new user. However, if you clear your cookies, your new visit will be considered a new user's visit.

We’ve sorted out our own visits, now let’s talk about other “Filters” capabilities that take into account the source data.

Using the specified functionality, you can filter the following data:

Visitor's IP address. This is relevant if not only you, but also your employees look at the site. You need to know the IP of their computers or the router that distributes to the department or office. Click “Add filter” and in the fields that open, indicate:

Traffic type – Exclude traffic;

Field – IP address;

Condition – Contains;

Equal to or Starts with (depends on the number of addresses and the most optimal criterion for adding);

The value is the IP address itself or a chain of them. Set this value and click Save. Below is a good example.

You can remove the filter by simply clicking on the cross.

Page URL. With its help, it is possible to filter those website page addresses where analytics is not needed. Let’s say you don’t need data from a transition from a certain external source, since these transitions are rare and the traffic from them is not targeted. Here you need to pay attention to the Conditions field, which contains a number of sub-items: “Contains”, “Starts with...”, “Equal to”, “Only site and other domains.

If the first points do not raise questions, then the last one needs to be dealt with. After the specified value is set, the report will include only those visits to the web resource and its domains that were specified when editing in the “General” tab. Below is a visual example.

Page title. Using this filter, you can prevent some analytics data from being displayed, for example, some pages or groups of pages with a certain title. Installing this is similar to the case that we considered earlier. Let’s set all the parameters and don’t forget to click Save.

Disabling filters without deleting

Everything is simple here - just use the checkboxes that are placed opposite the filters that will not be used.

Let's summarize: filters created for Yandex Metrics make it possible to exclude your own visits, as well as not show sources and data that are not of great importance, thanks to which you can focus on the target data.

Now let's talk about bots and how to cut them off.

We cut off bots in Yandex. Metrica

You can view the Robots report by making the following transition: Reports - Standard reports - Monitoring - Robots.

There is another way - use the search.

How to cut off search bots from the displayed data? Go to the “Filters” section. It was said earlier how to get there.

The last point at the bottom of the page deserves special attention. It’s called Robot Filtering and contains three sub-items:

Take into account the visits of all robots - in all reports that you receive, visits from bots will be noted;

Filter robots according to strict rules - selection according to specified patterns per IP address or group of addresses, or User-Agent. If the filter is enabled, there will be no “false” positives, and only a small part of the robots that perform indexing will be shown.

Filter robots only by strict rules and behavior - allows you to find the majority of search engine bots and show them in reports. This is relevant if you noticed a sharp surge in traffic that aroused your suspicion.

Speaking about the Filters section, I would like to go over the Operations item. Why is this option needed?

Firstly, it is needed to create strict/common rules that allow modification of the URLs of the pages that are shown in the reports. Rules are added and set according to the same principle as when adding filters. There are several operations, each of which has its own function.

Cut parameter - removes part of the page address. Useful when several pages have the same address, similar content, and need to be combined so that the report shows one page rather than two.

Cut all parameters- there is nothing to explain here;

Replace https protocol with http- using this rule, in the displayed report, the pages of the secret protocol are connected to the regular one and are shown as a single parameter;

Replace domain- replaces the domain in reports (page addresses);

Convert to lowercase- alphabetic characters in the URL are written in lowercase, excluding capital letters.

Operations are highly customizable so you can customize and optimize these metrics to suit your goals.

When setting up Filters and Operations, consider the following:

⦁ You can create no more than 60 Rules: 30 for filters and 30 for operations;

⦁ Changes in settings take effect only from the moment the options are added and saved. The old data will not change and will be displayed as before.

Final word

So, we see again that Yandex Metrica is a cool service that has great potential and enormous opportunities. The system of filters and setting rules makes it possible to adjust analytics to your goals, choosing only what is needed to monitor and calculate the information data you need.

Metrica works using the well-known mechanism of Internet counters. Using this service is possible after receiving a special code and installing it on each page of the site. But before that, you need to configure all the characteristics.

Initially, you get access to the personal part of Yandex. To do this, you need to enter your account login and password and go to the Metrics page. If you don’t have them, then you need to register in Yandex - the task is extremely simple to stop at. After authorization in Yandex, you can begin creating and setting up a counter.

Creating and setting up a counter

Opening the “General” tab, set the name of the counter, specify the domain and time zone of the region. If your site has “mirrors,” write down their addresses in the appropriate column (“Additional domains”). You can set up alerts about problems with the page and schedule a visit in the range from 30 to 360 minutes.

After confirming the user agreement, feel free to click the “Save” button. On the "General" tab it will be available unique number, automatically assigned to your meter. With its help, you can “link” campaigns in Yandex.Direct and set certain types of goals.

The “Meter Code” tab allows you to manage some of its functions. The code itself is also located here. ATTENTION: the counter code is installed on the site only after complete setup.

You now have several convenient and useful tools at your disposal to make it easier to set up and manage website optimization.

Webvisor- a function that allows you to record the behavior of site visitors. It makes it very easy to analyze the difficulties users have on key pages. You can use it to track navigation transparency, form actions, and much more. Then this information will be very useful to you during page optimization. We will look at the web viewer settings in more detail below, in a separate tab.

Scroll map– multifunctional tool. In addition to the actual clicks, it allows you to track scrolling, links and paths through the site. With its help, you can improve the usability of your resource, based on statistics of frequently used elements, distribution of visitors' attention across pages, clicks on links, etc. In general, this is an extremely useful thing.

Informer- a tool that displays information about site traffic for the current day. It provides a number of graphic settings that allow it to be succinctly integrated into the page design. Although the code for this tool can be embedded separately from the counter, without the latter the informer will not work.

Also, in the new Yandex.Metrica interface, additional options can be configured immediately. With their help you can:

• prohibit Metrica from allowing Yandex.Search to index a page with an installed counter;
• make the counter code asynchronous to avoid possible slowdown or blocking of site loading;
• improve statistics collection for AJAX and XML sites;
• ensure the transfer of additional proprietary characteristics to Metrica for collecting statistics (for example, order cost);
• change the code entry into a one-liner.

Once the setup is complete, save all changes and go to the “Webvisor” tab.

Setting up the Yandex Metrics web viewer

In the “Record page content” section, pages with unique content for each visitor are specified, which will be recorded along with actions. The picture above shows the cart section of an online store as an example. Please note that it is displayed with the products placed in it by the visitor during the visit. You may also notice that pages are not necessarily specified by the full URL, but often only by its significant part or regular expressions. Recording from the browser uses less resources, but sometimes appears distorted. In contrast, downloading from a website is more wasteful, but is displayed more accurately. In our opinion, it is more advisable to use the first option.

Function “Archive site pages” performs approximately the same task as the previous option, but is much less accurate, so we will not consider it in detail.

The last setting of the web viewer is the way pages are loaded into the player. It may belong to one of the following types.

"On your behalf". In this case, the page loaded into the player will be the same as what you see when visiting the site. Your authorization (if you have one) will be valid in the player. If the site has a shopping cart with the goods you have placed, you will see them, and not the contents of the visitor’s shopping cart.

"On behalf of an anonymous user". This mode displays the page in the player as it would be seen by a user visiting the site for the first time. If your resource provides authorization, the page will appear in an “unauthorized” form in the player. We recommend using this method if the player reproduces the actions of visitors with undesirable effects, for example, when new products are placed in your personal basket each time.

We consider the second method of loading the page to be more appropriate.

You can view all information on the web viewer and the click map on the main page of the counter by opening the “Behavior” tab.

Setting goals

Having finished debugging the web viewer, save the changes and proceed to setting up goals. Since this operation is dedicated, there is no point in dwelling on this point in detail.

Having finished setting up your goals, you can use Metrica to adjust filters that filter out unnecessary information from operations and reports, bringing control data to a different form. But about this in order.

Setting up filters in Yandex Metrica

The filter functionality allows you to exclude specific traffic from reports based on specified conditions, or cut off everything else, leaving only that traffic. As filtering criteria, you can select title, referrer, IP address (by specific value or interval) and page URL. Other criteria are specified with the conditions "starts with", "contains" or "equals". We talked about setting goals in more detail in the article on setting goals. You can also combine multiple (maximum 30 per counter) filters. In this case, they will work in the order in which they are located. It is possible to rearrange filters in sequence, disable them without deleting them, or simply delete them. By checking the appropriate box, you can clear the reports from the data of your own visits.

For example, using filters you can cut off office traffic. Simply define the intervals for the IP addresses of your enterprise, and the system will automatically clear the reports from the information remaining after website layout designers, managers and other employees have visited the site.

You can also clear reports from visits to your resource by robots. The filtering conditions here are:

• “strict rules” - fixed templates for User-Agent and IP addresses;
• “strict rules and behavior” applied to abnormal surges in incoming traffic.

Thanks to operations, you can change the URLs of pages displayed in reports. They allow you to remove all parameters or one of them, cut out the anchor, change the domain or https to http, convert everything to lower case. When eliminating a parameter or replacing a domain, you must specify that parameter and the new domain. In other cases, you only need to indicate what the operation was applied to (page address or referrer). Using operations, you can, for example, cut off the session identifier written in the link.

Installing a Yandex Metrica counter on a website

Only after completing all the necessary settings can you install the counter code on the site. We remind you once again that the code must be inserted on EVERY page, this is equally true for a one-page landing page and an online store. The code is written in the tag …. When changing the counter settings, these changes must be applied to its code on all pages of the site. Otherwise, you will receive data that corresponds to the old parameters. You can edit an existing counter by clicking on the gear. It is located in the list of all counters. You also have the opportunity to give access to viewing and editing the counter to other Yandex accounts (this may be needed when analyzing the analytics of your site), to do this, click on the “Accesses” button and set the necessary parameters.

Carefully consider the need for each tool and after each change of settings, carefully monitor the updates to the counter code!

You can also contact our agency and we will help you configure Yandex.Metrica correctly!

Business analytics: not a step without Yandex.Metrica! Service 1PS

1.3 “Filters” tab

1.3 “Filters” tab

After saving, go straight to the “Filters” tab ( Goals can be created later).

Filters are applied to the source data of the site statistics counter, leaving or deleting records in site reports that meet the specified conditions.

If there are no filters, the reports will include records of all visits. When creating a new filter, only new data will be filtered, old data will remain unchanged.

When checking the " don't count my visits» the service remembers the cookies of the last five visitors who accessed the reports of this counter and does not take them into account when calculating statistics. We recommend that you check this box.

You behave on your site completely differently from ordinary visitors - you spend more time on it, view more pages. If Metrica takes this data into account, the reports will display false information. This option allows you not to “clog” the statistics with data from your visits.

In addition to this checkbox, you can set separate filters for certain visits: exclude some traffic or, conversely, take into account only a certain type of traffic. If several developers and usability specialists work on your site, then it is better to find out their IP and add it to the filter:

Operations on source data change the appearance of the URLs of the pages of the reporting or referring site that are displayed in reports. Add operations if necessary, for example, if you need to cut out a parameter or replace https with http.

Robot filtering allows you to filter information about robot visits in service reports. It's better to leave it as marked by default.

– Take into account visits from all robots. Robot data will be available in the Robot report and will not be filtered out in other reports.

– Filter robots only according to strict rules(set by default). Under strict rules, only a small proportion of robots may be detected, but all human visits are guaranteed to be counted. All robot visits are reflected in the Monitoring > Robots report.

– Filter robots by strict rules and behavior. Use if you have found pronounced spikes in unnatural traffic in your statistics and there is a high probability that this will happen again. In this case, there may be an error in identifying real visitors: the system may mistake them for robots. Robot data will be completely filtered in all reports.

Filters/screens

Filters Rule It All The basis of recommendations and other tools for finding high-quality content in the long tail are filters. These technologies and services process a wide variety and offer selections that best suit your needs.