Why Direct clicks do not match Metrica visits
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A hundred clicks in Yandex Direct and seventy visits in Yandex Metrica are not a missing row. A click and a visit follow different rules, and some clicks never become a visit.
Below are four rules that pull the numbers apart, and one foreign rule you must not copy onto Direct search. How not to turn the gap into “no leads, so it must be bots” is covered in clicks without leads.
A display click is recorded before the site
For display ads, Direct records the click in its own system before the redirect to the site. The IAB compliance guide limits that rule to display placements and does not extend it to search as a whole. Do not copy it onto a search campaign. There is no fact for that.
Say a display ad received 100 clicks and the counter saw 70 visits. Thirty clicks may have been recorded before the redirect and never reached the page. The numbers are a worked example. They show where a gap comes from, not a normal loss.
If the site does not respond, Direct’s availability monitor stops impressions and starts them again when the site is back. That is about impressions. A display click already recorded does not become a visit because of it.
A repeat click inside a visit is not a new visit
A visit in Metrica is a sequence of actions by one visitor on one counter. It ends when there is no activity. The default timeout is 30 minutes. The first transition from an ad system, Direct for example, is always its own visit. While that visit continues, further clicks on the ad do not become new visits. That is the Metrica glossary.
Say the clicks arrived at 12:00, 12:10 and 12:20. If no pause ran longer than 30 minutes, Metrica has one visit. Three presses in the Direct account next to one visit row are not a broken export.
| Worked example | Clicks | Visits |
|---|---|---|
| Display, click recorded before redirect | 100 | 70 |
| Repeats inside 30 minutes | 3 | 1 |
The second row is the visit rule. It does not promise that Direct will glue three clicks into one. The two accounts count different events.
The Direct group is already without the removed clicks
Metrica reports in the Direct group are built from clicks that passed antifraud. Other Metrica slices do not get that filter. The Direct guide adds that every visit, including fraudulent ones, is written into analytics systems, so they still show activity Direct’s own reports have already filtered out.
The report Direct, summary opens at Reports → Sources → Direct, summary (Отчёты → Источники → Директ, сводка). Its statistics are based on clicks that passed Direct’s fraud protection. If the counter is not linked to the campaign, the transitions land in the source “Other campaigns” (Чужие кампании). Direct itself adds yclid to ad links.
Compare the same campaign. A summary on a linked counter and a slice of “all visits” answer different questions. What antifraud removes and what it leaves on the bill is covered in invalid clicks. Names in the Robots report do not add to this gap. That is another report, and its order is in how to find bots in Yandex Metrica.
The click id is not shown in reports
yclid is the identifier of a click on an ad. Direct assigns it and passes it in the URL so the visit can be tied to the source. The yclid itself is not shown in reports. There is nowhere in the Metrica interface to hunt the gap by a list of ids.
Google Ads counts a click even if the person never reached the site, including when the site was down. That is a Google rule, not a Direct rule. Do not copy it onto Direct search. The boundary at which a click that stayed in spend is called click fraud is set in what ad click fraud is.
A script on the site does not reconcile the two accounts. If a Metrica counter is set, the check result can be sent to it. That mark is not Metrica’s own definition of robots and does not rewrite the click count in Direct. The check does not count money. If there is no answer, the visit is let through.
A short order:
On a display campaign, do not expect a visit for every click. The click is recorded before the redirect.
Fold repeats inside 30 minutes into one visit before you count “lost” rows.
Compare the Direct summary with Direct spend, not with every visit on the site. “Other campaigns” means check the counter link first.
Do not copy Google’s click-without-a-visit rule onto Direct search.