Behavior as self-regulation: why a list of actions lies

A visitor opened your Russian site, looked at three pages and left. In the report that is a failure: “not interested”. But this person’s behavior did not end on the close-tab button. It went on. They opened a competitor’s page, then a marketplace listing, compared, came back two days later and placed an order. You saw none of it, because you counted actions one by one instead of watching the process whole.

That is the whole difference. Take behavior apart as a list of what a person did and you get a catalogue: arrived, clicked, left. Take it apart as a process in which the person keeps adjusting to what is around them, and you get a different picture and the points where you can intervene.

Why a list of actions lies

The habitual model is simple. Behavior is what a person does: got up, went, bought, pressed. Acts that are easy to list and count, and that fit a spreadsheet and a board slide equally well.

It has one flaw. It shows the molecules and hides the river.

Take the fridge. A person got up and went to the kitchen. In the list-of-actions model that is a discrete fact: “went to the fridge”. In reality it is one frame from a long process. Something inside went out of balance: hunger, boredom, a habit of eating through stress. The body noticed the tilt and began to level it. The walk to the kitchen is a step toward a new balance, and without the context the step loses its meaning.

A customer is the same. “The customer clicked the banner” is a single drop that speaks only of click-through rate. The process says more: the person was looking for a way to cut costs, the banner landed in that search, and the search moved one step forward. The first description yields a metric. The second yields a hint about what to do next.

What “the system regulates itself” means

Every action you observe is a stage of adjustment rather than a self-contained unit. The person keeps checking their state against the surroundings and tunes behavior to restore balance. Put simply, they do more than act. They level out.

For a business this changes the questions themselves. Look at the funnel as a list: arrived, looked, left. The conclusion is short and useless: “wrong customer”. Look at it as a process and the questions become workable. What knocked the person off balance? What balance were they trying to restore? What on the site added anxiety instead of removing it? At which moment did they abandon the search, and why?

The second set produces a diagnosis with specific places to repair. The landing page headline did not match what the ad promised: a message problem. The form frightens with its length: a usability problem. The text addresses a large corporation when the visitor owns a small workshop: a positioning problem. Each breakage is visible only on the whole path, never on one click.

Foreign companies run into a specifically Russian version of the message problem. The page was translated from the English original and kept its structure, so a Yandex Direct ad written by a local specialist for local demand leads to a page that answers a different question. The click counts as success. The path breaks one screen later, and the report calls it “low-quality traffic”.

A river instead of drops

Behavior has the properties of a stream. Direction: where the person is heading. Channel: the habitual tracks along which their attention and money flow. Resistance: the barriers that slow the flow or push it sideways. And composition: thoughts, emotions, old habits and fragments of earlier decisions all rushing along together.

The channel matters most. It decides where the person’s energy will flow. You can wave a flag from the bank all you like, but if the channel is cut past you, the flow goes past you.

An example from practice. A shop launches a promotion and cannot understand why good reach produces few orders. Drop by drop everything looks fine: impressions, clicks, visits. The flow shows something else. The habitual channel of a buyer in this category runs through a marketplace: that is where they search, compare prices, read reviews and buy. A standalone site stands off to the side of the channel. A banner will not turn the flow toward it. You either build into the habitual road or give a reason weighty enough for the person to leave it.

A foreign seller’s dashboards will never show this. In many consumer categories the channel runs through Wildberries, Ozon or Yandex Market, and the comparison happens inside the marketplace’s own reviews. A Western playbook assumes the channel runs through search and the brand’s own site, because in a Google-centred market it often does. Import that assumption and you will keep polishing the banner while the river flows past.

River water can be clear, or it can be a mudflow carrying sand and stones. When a person is choosing a contractor, cold price calculation, fear of being burned by a bad supplier again, yesterday’s conversation with a partner and fatigue from a long search all move at once. That is why a purchase decision is rarely clean logic. A seller who answers only the price question is working with clear water while a mudflow presses on the buyer. The argument seems right and does not land, because it hits the wrong component of the flow.

For a foreign brand in Russia the mud has an extra ingredient: the fear that the seller will leave the market and warranty, returns or payment will stop working. A price argument does nothing to that fear. A named local partner, a support channel in Telegram and a clear returns procedure do.

Two sources that pull behavior

The first is the environment: external signals that demand a reaction. The price rose, you reconsider the purchase. Advertising, price, a review, a salesperson’s words are all stimuli from outside.

The second is the internal state: what the person has in their head and body right now, what they are busy with, how tired they are. You can send a perfect external signal, and if everything inside is occupied with something else, there will be no reaction. A tired person at the end of a hard day scrolls past the ad they would have clicked in the morning.

Here is what puzzles many advertisers. The same ad works on some people and leaves others cold, though their age, city and interests match. The external signal is one. The internal states are different. Behavior depends on both sources at once, and you control only one of them directly. That is why hitting the moment matters more than one more impression.

Keep this in mind when you build audiences for Yandex Ads. Demography describes people from the outside and says almost nothing about what is inside them right now. The Direct tools that get closer to the internal state are the ones tied to a moment: adjustments by time of day and device, retargeting on a specific abandoned step, Metrica segments built on what the person actually did during the visit. An advertiser used to Google’s audience signals should expect to do more of this work by hand. The platform offers the levers. Which moment they describe is your job.

Behavior as a choice among many routes

Behavior is not a rigid chain of “if A, then B”. A person is not a machine where you press a button and get a guaranteed result. At every moment many directions are open, and they pick one by accumulated experience, current state and what is happening around them.

The closest analogy is a car navigator. From A to B there are a dozen routes. Which one gets chosen depends on traffic, which is resistance. On how familiar the road is, which is habit. And on the driver’s state: hurried or relaxed, fresh or worn out. Behavior runs on the same logic: parameters weighed, probable optimum returned.

For marketing the conclusion is sobering. You cannot force a customer down the road you want. The order “buy” does not work, and neither does the order “love the brand”. But you can change the parameters of the route. Lower resistance where you want to lead: remove an extra checkout step, shorten the form, answer the objection in advance. Raise resistance where you do not want to lead. The system still decides the outcome, but some of its parameters are in your hands.

Which is why a strong brand is not about talking someone into something. It is about becoming a familiar, well-worn channel that the person’s flow turns into almost without resistance. For a company entering Russia this is the honest description of the task: you arrive as an unfamiliar channel where familiar ones already exist, and the work of brand strategy is to shorten the time it takes to become one of them.

What to do with this in practice

One click, one call, one abandoned order mean almost nothing on their own. Meaning appears when you see where the person came from and what stopped them.

The first description: “the customer opened the email and did not click the link”. That is a drop. All you will extract from it is an open rate.

The second: “the customer has spent a month looking for a replacement for a contractor who keeps letting them down, the email landed in that search, the subject line caught, they opened it, saw a generic text and went back to their own affairs, because the email removed none of their worries”. That is the flow. It shows at once what to fix: the content, never the subject line.

A metric answers “what happened”. A process answers “why” and hints at “what next”. The first is needed for the report. The second is needed to change anything.

Metrica has the tools for the second reading: session replay shows a visit as a sequence, and the segment builder isolates the people who reached a given step and left. That covers the river inside your site. The stretch outside it, the marketplace comparison and the messenger conversation, has no counter and is reconstructed from customer conversations and from what your sales team hears. That is the work most foreign entrants skip because it does not fit in a dashboard.

Seeing your own flow whole starts with the question of what balance the person was trying to restore when they came to you, rather than with a table of clicks.

Counting drops is easy. The channel is changed by the one who sees the river.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Поведение как саморегуляция