Yandex Blog

Our job is to make life easier for everyone, which sometimes means just showing them the opportunities they have never thought of before. We are always on the lookout for new possibilities for our users on any platforms or devices.

When Telegram instant messaging service launched its open Bot Platform last June, the new possibilities came up in the form of fun and efficient chat bots easily implementable on the service. When chatting to someone online it's much easier to just ask a chat bot a straightforward question and receive an instant answer without leaving the chat, than going over to the browser window and looking for information. Chat bots are good at providing simple, factual information, such as a weather forecast for the coming weekend, current traffic conditions, or definition for a new word.

To help chatters enjoy their chatting even more, some of our developers have made chat bots based on Yandex services using Telegram Bot API. Most of these chat bots provide information relevant for our users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey and Kazakhstan, but the ImageSearch chat bot and the Yandex Translator bot could be of use to anyone outside of our current key markets.

ImageSearch instantly offers the user a graphic image or photograph from the Yandex.Images service in response to a keyword request on Telegram. Just type what you want to see and ImageSearch retrieves a picture, which can be shared with other chatters in a couple of clicks.To see something else in response to the same request, just type “/more”. Add the ImageSearch bot to your chat and communicate with your friends using pictures, gifs or memes mined from the internet by the chat bot.

Yandex Translator helps you translate words or phrases and talk to anyone in any of the languages currently available for translation based on Yandex’s technology. With Yandex Translator each member of an international chat can type in their own language and the chat bot will automatically translate their words into the language of their interlocutor.

Telegram's stores currently offers over thousands of chat bot programs for every taste or any problem. To help other chat bot developers, whose goal to make life easier and more fun for everyone we share, we have created a free analytics tool, Botan. Based on Yandex’s free app tracking and analytics tool, AppMetrica, Botan allows chat bot developers know their audience better, including gathering information about specific audience segments or learning about which bot commands are the most popular with certain groups of people.

Yandex is rolling out a revamped version of its mobile app analytics platform – now under the name “AppMetrica”. The new platform features a powerful mobile ad tracking solution in addition to the pre-existing features – user analytics and crash reports. Now AppMetrica covers all key domains for marketers, publishers and developers – and they can access it completely for free and without any limits, in real-time mode and with a single SDK.

We released our analytics tool for the first time almost two years ago as Yandex.Metrica for Apps. It was our response to the lack of good user analytics solutions on market – we had to create our own to learn how mobile apps published by Yandex were performing. Then we thought it may be of interest to other people around the world, and opened it up for everyone – for free.

Since 2013 we’ve been getting requests from marketers and developers who love the way we do it – currently AppMetrica processes nearly one billion in-app events every day for apps connected to the service. However, users need more, and we got clear signals from our in-house mobile marketers who track Yandex’s app user acquisitions. The main problem is that they had to spend up to 15% of their budgets on mobile ad measurement tools alone, which is quite a lot even for us ☺. Another issue is that product analysts and managers couldn’t easily use detailed traffic source segmentation in analytics tools as the two are separated and usually developed by different providers. In the end, different tools require the integration of multiple SDKs, so project teams need to spend more time on development and testing. We spent almost two years solving these issues to turn AppMetrica into a fully-fledged, integrated, professional mobile analytics and tracking platform.

The new AppMetrica provides detailed ad campaign reporting. Users can drill down to analyse how well different creatives and ad placements are performing, see tracking link parameters breakdowns, and get user engagement reports by applying cohort analysis with retention and event conversion rates which gives a really insightful analysis of traffic quality. AppMetrica is integrated with the most popular mobile ad networks out of the box, including AdColony, InMobi, Millennial Media, Vungle, and many others. We keep expanding the list of ad networks, and users can also manually integrate traffic sources they need and set up postbacks in a few easy steps.

The new platform aids re-engagement improvements using state-of-the-art deep linking technology. Hardcore marketers have the opportunity to pull raw data from AppMetrica via its API so they can create in-house custom reports or use it in their proprietary software. They soon will get even more options to improve conversion: we are now working on integration with data export from AppMetrica to popular re-targeting and look-alike platforms.

AppMetrica works with Android, iOS and Windows Phone apps. Game developers will also enjoy our Unity plugin. AppMetrica is available for free and starts to provide reports in just a few minutes after rolling up an app with the integrated SDK.