Today, investing money in online advertising without setting up analytics tools is impractical. Using these tools, you can get extremely useful information that will help you redistribute your budget in the right direction and get the maximum return from advertising (you can find out, for example, how many visitors come to your site, from what region and at what time of day, what gender and age they are, how they behave on the site, which pages they visit most often and which they leave immediately, where you lose users, what buttons they click click and much more).

We are starting a series of analysis of key indicators Yandex.Metrics to convey their essence in the simplest language.

VISITS

Our partners at first meeting with the Yandex service.Metrics get lost in the stream of numbers and ask questions: « PWhy are there more views than visits, and fewer visitors than views?”, “HWhat do these metrics mean and how are they related to each other?» . In this article we will try to give a detailed answer to these questions.

First, let's understand the terminology.

Visit – sequence of actions of one visitor on the site. It begins from sunset to the site and ends care from the site (when the user closes a browser tab or follows a link to another site), or a visit automatically ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Moreover, if the user left the browser tab open and walked away, hreturned 35 minutes later (timeout period has expired) and went to another page of the site, this one a viewing is considered a new visit.

Since Yandex.Metrica considers transition from advertising systems (Yandex.Direct, etc.) with a separate visit,even if the advertisement brought the visitor again, the number of visits almost matches the number of paid clicks in the advertising system. Therefore, Visit is our key metric.

VIEWS

In each Yandex.Metrica report you will see the parameter « View depth», who says about the average number of page views per visit. For example, viewing depth 2.33 says that on average visitors view from two to three pages.

Here the question arises: how to evaluate this indicator? Is 3 pages viewed a lot or a little? The answer to this question lies in the theme of the site. For information resources, of course, a good indicator would be a high viewing depth of 3, 4 or more pages. But for online stores, especially when it comes to online advertising, the opposite is true. The fact is that if an advertising specialist has done the job at the proper level, then each advertisement leads to a page with the desired product. Users do not need to study the site; the necessary information is already on the first page.

The largest online agencies studied the influence of viewing depth on conversion in the field of e-commerce and formulated 3-click rule.

This rule states that each website visitor makes 3 clicks: first in the search engine by button "Find", second - according to advertisement and the third - by button "Buy" on the store's website. With each extra click, the conversion of a visitor into a buyer will quickly decrease. If the depth of views for your online store exceeds 3, then most likely users cannot quickly find the product they need, and you are losing customers.

VISITORS

The same person can make several visits to your site over different periods of time. To track the number of unique users, another indicator has been introduced in Metrica - Visitor.

Visitor – a user who has visited the site within a certain period of time. A visitor is considered unique if it has a non-repeating set of characteristics (IP address, browser, OS, cookies, etc.). Therefore, the same person visiting the site from different devices will be counted as several unique visitors.

“Browsing depth is a behavioral factor that influences website ranking. By correctly analyzing this parameter, you will optimize your work with the site and learn to provide users with the most useful and converting materials.”

Site browsing depth is the number of pages that a user visited during one session. Yandex takes into account viewing depth when ranking. Webmasters consider viewing depth as a metric reflection of the user’s involvement and interest in the resource. The lower the viewing depth, the worse the site’s chances of reaching the TOP and converting a visitor into a regular customer.

Let's figure out what the average viewing depth is, how to track this indicator, and also consider simple ways increasing the depth of site viewing.

View depth value for a site

Browsing depth is a behavioral factor that directly affects a site’s position in search. This factor is closely related to the user’s time on the site. The more interesting pages the user discovers, the further he will go through the site and the more time he will spend on its pages, not to mention the refusal and return to the search results. This parameter is determined by:

• Problems that the site solves- the depth of browsing of online stores and social networks differs significantly from the depth of user immersion in an information site. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to talk about standards. This parameter must be monitored over time in order to understand what is normal for the site being analyzed and how to optimize work on it.
• Website usability- how convenient, functional, simple and understandable the user’s site is depends on his desire to study the site further.
• Website page optimization- how pages involve the user in the life of the site and recommend other materials/pages/products to him.
• Relevance of the site to the user's request- how accurately and correctly the site answers the question - compliance of the site/page/information/product with the user’s expectations.
• Availability of interactive elements- options for user interaction with the site that increase engagement. These are calculators, videos, photo galleries - all those elements that attract attention and keep the user on the site.

Important! The depth of site browsing may not reflect the user’s interest in the site, but indicate unclear navigation and poor site structure. To do this, it is necessary to analyze the viewing depth in conjunction with the average time on the site. A high depth of browsing in a short time on the site with low conversion indicates that users do not find what they were looking for.

Yandex Metrica: site viewing depth

You can find out the depth of site viewing in Yandex Metrica in the summary and in the tab of the same name. This interface shows the most important parameters resource status: failures, viewing depth, time on the site.

The average viewing depth is calculated as follows:

number of pages viewed for a certain period: number of visits to the site during the same time interval

By opening the View Depth tab in Yandex Metrica, you will see changes in indicators for the period:

This parameter is useful to track in order to determine the quality of content and page optimization at a certain point in time. If the viewing depth is small, this indicates:

• Irrelevance of the page/content to the user request- analyze what queries users use to get to the site pages. Whether the page responds to the request.
• Poor page optimization- the user does not receive offers to move further on the site. The lack of interactive elements determines the low level of engagement.

Low site browsing depth - what to do?

First of all, you need to understand what is normal for the type of site being analyzed. A viewing depth of 3-4 pages is the norm for an informational site, while this is not enough for an online store.

Internal linking

One of the most popular methods for increasing viewing depth is correct internal linking- this is the placement of thematic links on the page:

Interactive elements

The most useful option for increasing the depth of views is the photo gallery. It is through viewing images and photographs that the depth of viewing online stores and social networks reaches critical maximums.

In addition, high user involvement in the site increases the time spent on the site, which is also taken into account by search engines when ranking.

It is important that the title and snippet of the article are as catchy and eye-catching as possible.

In online stores this is implemented like this:

Simplify navigation

The user must see where he is on the site at every moment of time. Bread crumbs help with this. A chain of links simplifies navigation and transitions to desired sections and subsections.

There are methods to artificially increase the depth of views by forcing users to make additional clicks to achieve what they want.

To do this, the content is divided into parts and published on different pages, as one of the popular foreign medical portals does.

To obtain complete information on the drug, the user is forced to visit all tabs. On some resources, content is divided into 10 or more parts.

Such structuring of content is acceptable in cases where there is a lot of information and it is complex. However, such content delivery should not pursue the goal of increasing the depth of views, but of improving the user experience.

Other sites use the method of artificially involving the user in the site, offering to find him a discount coupon or receive a gift on the site pages.

If the site offers useless content for the user, then no “bait” will convert him into a client.

conclusions

View depth reflects the site's potential to interest the user and lead him to conversion. In combination with such a factor as time on the site, you can determine the quality of optimization and navigation. If the viewing depth is sufficient, but the time on the site is extremely short, this indicates that users do not understand the site structure. Most likely, users do not find the required materials.

Analysis of viewing depth over time shows which materials are most interesting to the user, prompted him to visit recommended pages, and what works best to increase conversion.

The viewing depth should be determined individually for each site. There are no standard values ​​that apply to every type of site.

Low viewing depth does not always indicate poor optimization or low-quality content, or the page’s irrelevance to the request. This factor cannot be analyzed in isolation from the page. There are completely self-sufficient website pages that fully satisfy the user’s request.

In this article, we will figure out who is considered a visitor in Yandex metrics, what visits and views are - these are the statistics that are displayed by default in the traffic report:

Visitors in Yandex metrics are unique visits to your website. Uniqueness is determined by IP address, operating system, browser, cookies and other parameters. That is, if a person with a unique set of parameters visits your site, he is considered a visitor. If the same person (with the same set of data) visits the site a second time, for example in a day, he will no longer be considered a visitor. Therefore, in the statistics, the metrics of visitors are always less than visits - some people visit your site more than once per day.

Regardless of the first, second, third... time a person visits your site, he makes a visit. For example, a person with a certain set of parameters visited your site for the first time in 24 hours - this is both a visitor and he made a visit. Then I closed your site and visited again 1 hour later. He made another visit, but he will not be considered a visitor for the second time. It turns out that one visitor made two visits. The visit timeout is 30 minutes. That is, every half hour, a visit to the site by the same visitor will be considered a new visit.

Views are the number of times your website pages are downloaded (reloaded) by one visitor. One visitor can view 2 pages of your site during the first visit, 3 pages of the site during the second visit, and, for example, another 5 pages of your site within 24 hours during the third visit. This visitor made 10 views in total. That is, Yandex metrics statistics count views from each unique visitor.

The share of new visitors in Yandex metrics is displayed for the reporting period you select. For example, the default reporting period is week. Accordingly, the Percentage of new visitors column will display the percentage of new unique visitors for the week:

To put it another way, if the same visitor (a person with the same set of data) visited your site on Monday and Wednesday, he will not be considered new, but it will be two visitors since he visited on different days, albeit with the same set data. Using this principle, the percentage of new visitors in Yandex Metrics for the selected reporting period is calculated.

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View depth in Metrica is the number of pages a user views on a website during one visit.

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Why is it important for a website owner to know the viewing depth?

Yandex is interested in providing correct answers to user questions. He needs useful and informative resources. For example, a user sees 10 sites for one request. He will visit them one by one until he finds useful information. It is the site on which he stops that has moved to various sections that is useful for both the person and Yandex. Such a resource will appear more often as a result of certain requests.

That's why viewing depth is one of the behavioral factors, affecting the site’s position in search results. It is not the main one, but it is still necessary to take it into account.

How to find out browsing depth using Yandex. Metrics

This tool is one of the most popular among all similar services. Its interface is simple, and the reports are accurate and understandable. For Metrica to start analyzing your website, you need to install a counter on it. After this, you can look at the reports, we won’t write about them in detail here, if you want more information, read, in it the Metrics reports are sorted into sections.

Metrica has a separate report called “View Depth”. It's very easy to find. Go to Standard Reports – – View Depth

The system will give you the necessary data:

You can also sort indicators in the reports, for example, find viewing depth data for men from large cities. This feature can be useful for analyzing the behavior of target visitors.

View depth in Yandex Metrica is one of the indicators that indicates the usefulness of information in various sections of the site. It can also be used to judge how convenient the navigation on the site is. For example, if you have a large number of transitions to the landing page, and the viewing depth indicator is low, then most likely the reason is inconvenient navigation or design errors. Find out at what stage the user leaves the page, analyze this information and try to understand why this happens. Having trouble finding the right section in the menu? Is the font too small or translucent? Internal links in texts are not highlighted, which is why the user does not know that they are clickable? Or maybe it's due to an overabundance of advertising and pop-ups?

The Webvisor tool from the already mentioned Yandex will help you monitor user behavior on the site. Metrics. It records visits, with its help you can look at your resource through the eyes of the user and follow his path. This will help you quickly find an error, come up with a solution to the problem, fix it and increase your viewing depth.