“Yandex Direct, costs” report

  1. Ways to use this report
  2. Conditions for getting the report
  3. Report structure and settings
  4. Questions and answers

The report contains information about expenditures on pay-per-click and pay-per-conversion campaigns in Yandex Direct. The report shows data for campaigns that lead to the site (but not to the mobile app).

This data is supplemented with session information (for example, the bounce rate, session depth, and time on site). All the information needed to analyze the performance of an ad campaign can be shown in a single report.

Note. Reports provide statistics starting from November 1, 2015.

Ways to use this report

The report helps you analyze Yandex Direct advertising campaigns in different contexts: spending and number of attracted customers.

Conditions for getting the report

The report can be viewed by the owner of the relevant Yandex Direct campaign, representatives of the owner, or agency representatives.

If you don't have access to a tag in Yandex Metrica, ask the owner of the tag to grant you access, for example, guest access.

If you have access to multiple Yandex Direct clients' campaigns, the list of these clients' chief representatives will be available in the Yandex Metrica interface.

Report structure and settings

To display information in the report, Yandex Metrica gets data about clicks and expenditures and compares them with session data for the selected period. Some data might be outside of the specified period. This depends on the attribution model used in the report.

For example, when you select the “Last click from Yandex Direct” model, a click or conversion might occur after the selected time period, be linked to a later session, and fail to show up in the report. When you select the “First click” model, a click might occur earlier than the site session. In this case, the date of the click might be outside the report period, and the data might fail to show up in the report. We recommend increasing the date range when generating the report.

Specifics of the display and calculation of some metrics:

Sessions
Linked to the tag installed on the site that the ad leads to.
Сlicks
Available in the report for any tag that you have access to. Data is shown for campaigns that lead to the site, if you have access to them in Yandex Direct.
Expenses

Yandex Metrica includes CPC for pay-per-click campaigns and CPA for pay-per-conversion campaigns.

Expenditures are calculated without VAT. If you pass data in different currencies, you can select a specific currency in the report. When you select a currency, the values of money metrics are recalculated at the conversion rate preceding the expenditure date.

The amounts may differ depending on whether the account was converted to the payment currency. For instance, if you converted the account to rubles, the cost is calculated with the discount (if one was awarded before September 1, 2015) and is available in two currencies: rubles and Yandex units.

Yandex Metrica links the expenditure data to the click date. Therefore, for pay-per-conversion campaigns, expenditure data may differ from the Yandex Direct “Report on conversions”, where expenditures are calculated as of the conversion date.

The report supports some custom settings. For example, segmentation, segment comparison, and goal selection. When creating a goal-based report, the indicators of “clicks”, “costs”, and “average costs” don't change.

Questions and answers

The “Yandex Direct, costs” report displays campaigns with zero values
The report shows:These can be campaigns that lead to other sites that have a different Yandex Metrica tag installed.

Select a question to find a solution.

“Yandex Direct” reports are missing data
The reports show data for archived and stopped campaigns
Yandex Metrica reports and Yandex Direct statistics provide different data
Other questions

Check that:

  • The tag ID is specified in the Yandex Direct campaign settings, and Tag links for Yandex Metrica is enabled.
  • Tag settings in the Yandex Metrica interface don't have excessively narrow filters set up on the Filters tab.
  • The tag is installed on all the landing pages. To see data for pages that have the Yandex Metrica tag installed, go to Reports → Standard reports → Content → Popular. Data is shown if site users visited these pages. To check whether the tag is installed correctly on any of the site pages, see Checking the tag.
  • The site was functioning correctly during the selected report dates.

Yandex: Unknown means that the session that Yandex Metrica registered couldn't be traced to a specific click on a Yandex Direct ad. Besides the advertising system itself, the rest of the data couldn't be detected either, including the campaign, keyword, and query.

The reason for Yandex: Unknown appearing in a Yandex Direct source might be a gap in time between generating the yclid tag and registering the session in Yandex Metrica. This can happen in the following situations:
  • The user clicked an ad but left the source page open on a browser tab, and later refreshed the page.
  • The user clicked a link from an ad, but then forwarded it to someone else. A repeat visit using this link won't be associated with the click on the Yandex Direct ad, either.

Make sure that the label is formed correctly. A UTM label has five parameters, presented in any order, separated by ampersands (&):

http://example.com/?utm_source=yandex&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=campaign123&utm_content=ad456&utm_term=keyword
If the page URL already contains parameters, the label should be added after an ampersand (&):
http://example.com/?uid=1234&utm_source=yandex&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=campaign123&utm_content=ad456&utm_term=keyword

In addition, UTM labels might not be counted because:

  • The Yandex Metrica tag isn't installed on landing pages or is installed incorrectly. Check how the tag is installed.
  • The ad specifies a URL that redirects to a page that doesn't have the Yandex Metrica tag installed.
  • The ad specifies a URL that redirects to another page, and the UTM labels are lost.
  • The ad specifies an invalid URL that doesn't open a page.

The standard report on UTM labels has a hierarchical structure: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, and utm_term.

If you use every UTM label except utm_content, data for utm_term won't be available in the standard Labels report group report. In order to start showing the labels, remove utm_content from the report.

Label parameters have standardized names: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, and utm_term. You can't change them or create custom names (like utm_keyword or utm_word), because they won't be part of the UTM labels and their data won't be reflected in the “UTM labels” report.

For example:
http://example.com?utm_source=yandex&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign={campaign_id}&utm_keyword={keyword}

where utm_keyword is a custom parameter.

The “UTM labels” report shows information for the utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign parameters. Information for the utm_keyword parameter is only available in the report Standard reports → Content → By URL parameters.


This happens as the reports are by default based on the Last non-direct click attribution model. It helps you calculate the conversion rate more precisely by taking into account the user's session history to select the traffic source.

To remove statistics on a stopped or archived campaign from the report, select the Last click model. In this case, Yandex Metrica detects the current traffic source for each session.

See the reasons why data may differ. If the reasons have been resolved but you still have questions, fill out the form below.