Yandex Metrica

What Is Yandex Metrica?

Yandex Metrica is a web analytics platform developed by Yandex, Russia's largest technology company and search engine. With over 70% search market share in Russia and significant presence across CIS countries (Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine, etc.), Turkey, and parts of Eastern Europe, Yandex is a major force in these markets. Metrica is their free analytics tool, used by over 3 million websites worldwide.

What makes Yandex Metrica remarkable is not just its analytics capabilities — which rival Google Analytics — but the fact that it includes heatmaps, session recordings, and form analytics for free. These are features that tools like Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity provide separately, and that most analytics platforms charge premium prices for. With Metrica, you get a complete analytics + behavior insights platform at zero cost.

Core Analytics Features

Yandex Metrica provides comprehensive web analytics comparable to Google Analytics:

• Visitor tracking — unique visitors, page views, sessions, bounce rate, session duration
• Traffic sources — organic search, direct, referral, social, paid advertising with campaign tracking
• Geographic data — visitor locations with drill-down to city level
• Device and browser data — desktop vs. mobile breakdown, operating systems, screen resolutions
• Real-time data — live visitor count and activity on your store
• Custom segments — filter reports by any combination of dimensions

Behavior Analytics (Free!)

WebVisor — Session Recordings

Yandex Metrica's WebVisor is a session recording tool that captures actual visitor sessions for playback. You can watch how visitors navigate your store, where they click, how they scroll, and where they get confused or frustrated. Unlike Hotjar (which has session limits on free plans), WebVisor has no recording limits — it records all visitor sessions by default.

WebVisor recordings include:

• Mouse movements, clicks, and scrolling
• Page transitions and navigation paths
• Form interactions (with sensitive data masked)
• Window resizing and viewport changes

Heatmaps

Metrica generates several types of heatmaps:

• Click map — shows where visitors click on each page, revealing popular and ignored areas
• Scroll map — shows how far visitors scroll, helping you position important content above the drop-off point
• Link map — highlights which links get the most and least clicks, useful for navigation optimization
• Attention map — combines time spent and visibility to show which page areas receive the most attention

All heatmaps are available for every page on your store, for any date range, with no additional cost.

Form Analytics

This feature is particularly valuable for ecommerce checkout optimization. Form Analytics shows you:

• Which fields in your forms cause the most hesitation (time spent)
• Which fields visitors leave blank or skip
• Where in the form visitors abandon the process
• The overall form completion rate

For PrestaShop checkout flows, this data reveals exactly which checkout fields create friction. If 40% of visitors abandon the form at the phone number field, you know what to fix.

Ecommerce Tracking

When connected to your PrestaShop store, Yandex Metrica tracks ecommerce data including:

• Revenue — total revenue, revenue by traffic source, revenue by product
• Orders — order count, conversion rate, average order value
• Product data — which products are viewed, added to cart, and purchased

Conversion Funnels

Define multi-step funnels (e.g., homepage → category → product → cart → checkout → confirmation) and Metrica shows you the conversion rate and drop-off at each step with visual funnel charts. This helps you identify exactly where in the purchase process you're losing customers.

Why Use Metrica (Even Outside Russia)?

Even if you don't target Russian-speaking markets, Yandex Metrica offers compelling advantages:

• Free behavior analytics — heatmaps and session recordings that other tools charge for are included at no cost.
• No traffic limits — unlike Hotjar (free plan: limited sessions) or Clarity (which can lag on high-traffic sites), Metrica handles any traffic volume.
• Second analytics opinion — running Metrica alongside Google Analytics gives you a cross-reference for your data, helping identify discrepancies or gaps.
• Form analytics — a unique feature not available in GA4, Clarity, or Hotjar's free plan.
• No data sampling — reports on 100% of your traffic, unlike GA4 which samples on larger datasets.

Essential for CIS Market Stores

If your store targets Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Uzbekistan, or other CIS countries, Yandex Metrica is not optional. Yandex is the dominant search engine in these markets, and Metrica integration is required for:

• Yandex.Direct advertising — Russia's largest PPC platform uses Metrica for conversion tracking and audience building
• Yandex SEO — Metrica data feeds into Yandex's Webmaster tools for search optimization
• Yandex.Market integration — proper analytics tracking for Russia's largest product marketplace

Technical Implementation

• Async loading — the Metrica tracking code loads asynchronously, never blocking page rendering.
• WebVisor recording — captures DOM changes efficiently using a mutation observer, with minimal performance overhead.
• No jQuery dependency — vanilla JavaScript, compatible with any PrestaShop theme.
• Automatic SPA support — handles AJAX page transitions for stores with dynamic content loading.

Privacy

Yandex Metrica sets cookies for visitor tracking. Under GDPR, obtain consent before firing the tag for EU visitors. Metrica provides built-in options for IP anonymization and respects Do Not Track browser signals. Data is processed on Yandex's servers in Russia — consider this for data residency requirements.

Setup

1. Create a free account at metrica.yandex.com and add your website.
2. Copy your Tag Number (a numeric counter ID).
3. Install this module in PrestaShop, paste the Tag Number, and save.
4. Data starts flowing immediately — WebVisor recordings appear within minutes.