3 ways of gathering data about your Russian customers

Even if you don’t plan to launch an advertising campaign in the Runet right now, but you already have the Russian version of your website, start collecting data about your visitors today!

It is important to have accumulated statistics of your website before starting any marketing activity in Russia: SEO, PPC, Content marketing, Social marketing etc. By statistics I mean:

• Queries that users entered before getting to your website
• User behavior (source, landing page, what do they click, how they behave on each page)
• Did they buy anything on your website?
• And if not, at what stage they refused to purchase on your website, what prevented them?
• What are their interests (such data will be collected in Yandex with their own algorithms)?

First of all, this data will help you better understand the intent of your potential customer. Secondly, you will learn about the ‘weak’ areas of your website. And finally, the accumulated statistics will allow you to target those customers who have already visited your website, but, for example, did not buy your product or service.

Add Yandex.Metrica Tracking Code

Let’s install the Yandex.Metrica code. This tool is similar to Google Analytics. By the way, it is now the second most popular analytics tool in the world. But unlike Google Analytics, Yandex’ service allows you to see the actual queries of your website visitors coming from Yandex and Mail.ru search. Sometimes you may find also some Google queries there.

Now let’s register your Yandex.Metrica tracking code.

I’ve made a video describing this process:

And here is detailed instruction:

1. Sign up for Yandex, if you don’t have an account there.
2. Open https://metrika.yandex.com and click Add counter button: 
3. Fill in information about your counter and click Create counter:

Done, your counter’s been created. Go to the settings of the tracking code by clicking on the tab Counter code. In order not to burden the article with a description of all settings of the counter, I have here universal settings, which are suitable for most websites:

• enable tracking of user behavior (Webvisor, scroll map, form analysis),
• make code in one line (for convenience),
• disable informer.

If you have an e-commerce website, check the option Dispatch ecommerce data to Metrica. By default it uses the same data layer as Google Analytics (details).

Click Save, copy your code to the clipboard and then either pass it to a developer who will paste it on the site, or do it yourself – right in your website source code or through Google Tag Manager.

To make sure that the counter is correctly installed, go to the main page, and to the left of the new profile click on the round arrow button. If everything is fine it should turn green, like this:Thus, the data collection began. Depending on how much traffic from the Runet your website gets, in the next few days you can see first statistics on the queries from Yandex or Mail.ru (Reports > Standard Reports > Sources > Keywords), data on behavior in Webvisor tool, and other useful information.

Add Your Website to Yandex.Webmaster Tool

In short, this tool helps to understand what Yandex knows about your website and how it’s being displayed in Yandex search results. But in the context of this article, data about your visitors is the most important for us. What is good about Yandex.Webmaster is that it gives us information about queries by which users found your website link, but for some reason did not click. Most often it happens because website ranking is too low (here you can read about Yandex Rank Checker), sometimes because of unattractive snippet.

So, let’s add our site to Yandex.Webmaster:

1. You already have an account on Yandex, so open https://webmaster.yandex.com, click Add site and type in our domain:
   
2. Next, confirm your ownership rights. The easiest way is to download the HTML file and upload it in the root directory of your site. Then click Check.
   
3. If all is well, your website will be added to the Webmaster panel, and you have to wait for 1-2 days while Yandex will collect statistics on the website. And then you’ll see something like this: 
   

Install VK.com Retargeting Code

VK.com is Top-1 social media platform in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus with more than 80M active users daily (source). If you want to reach Eastern European customers, you’ll definitely get them there.

Retargeting is an advertising tool which allows you to appeal to users who have previously visited your website. With retargeting on VK.com you can show visitors a reminder or a special offer, thereby holding the audience back to your website.

If you think that sooner or later you’ll give a try to VK.com ads, then do not hesitate to install retargeting code. You will be able to start campaign with users who have already interacted with your website. You can inform them about discounts, new product offer, or about new content on your blog. What’s important, the same mechanism can be used in Yandex advertising, because Yandex.Metrica’s tracking code already contains retargeting code.

Now let’s install retargeting code for VK.com:

1. If you do not have account on VK, you should sign in here: https://vk.com. You can use your Facebook account by clicking on Sign in with Facebook.
2. Once your profile is created, go to the VK advertising panel in section of Retargeting https://vk.com/ads?act=retargeting. Here you will create your retargeting audiences. Retargeting audience is a list of visitors who have visited specific pages on your site.
3. First, you have to create a retargeting pixel. It’s just a Javascript code, which you should paste on your website. Click Create pixel and fill in your pixel’s name, domain and choose a proper category of your website. Then click Create: 
4. You’ll get your retargeting code. Install it on your website. Remember, that unlike Metrica code, you should paste VK retargeting code between <head> and </head> tags: 
5. As you’ve installed it properly, click Create audience button. You will see a window for creating a retargeting audience. Enter a name and then in Rule field select whether you want all the users to get into this retargeting group, or only those who have visited certain pages. Specify number of days you want these people to remain in your retargeting group: 

That’s it. Now all users who visit my website www.runetology.com, if they have an account in VK (which is about 80% of users in Russia or Ukraine) and are logged in, will get into this retargeting group.

When your retargeting group will get at least 100 users, you can target your ads on them. Just add funds to your balance on VK via PayPal or VISA/Mastercard, and create an ad by clicking Create Ad to the right of a specific retargeting group name.