Yahoo Web Analytics - Let's Get Started

IndexTools was bought by Yahoo earlier this year and yesterday they rebranded themselves as Yahoo! Web Analytics.
Dennis Mortensen, Director of Data Insights at Yahoo, writes:

The re-branding also includes the launch of a new website and changes to the analytics product itself. It also includes a few enhancements to the tool, beyond making it scalable and compliant with the Yahoo! stack. From a user perspective, the first most noticeable fact is that we are moving to a single sign-on provided by Yahoo! and your account will be tied into your overall Yahoo! account.
As part of this announcement, we are also opening up further access to the tool and are now actively supporting:
• Yahoo! Store
• Yahoo! Developers (Y!OS)
• Yahoo! Head Advertisers (Microsites)
And for these, this is not just random access as in handing out 15000 logins, but well thought through integration with the platforms themselves. If you e.g. are a Yahoo! store owner you can enable enterprise-class web analytics by simply ticking a box and we then automatically inflate the correct tracking script variables at runtime. You are of course allowed to turn this off and take control yourself if needed. If you are a developer you will probably not even notice that it is us, as we fully instrument on the fly and create reports through the YWA API. All very exciting stuff I will elaborate on in future posts.
As you can read, this is not a free-for-all-come-and-get-it launch, but a carefully planned controlled access launch, which will keep all of our functionality in place and even enhance it. There is no dumbing down of the tool in any of the engagements above - and we will be working hard to add to the list of customers who can get access. So expect the above list to grow rapidly over the course of 2008. Anywho; The official PR message is:
Yahoo! Web Analytics will be released in stages to various business units and eco-system partners!

Some blog posts and articles (e.g. Yahoo Web Analytics claims faster updates than Google Analytics) are comparing Yahoo! Web Analytics to Google Analytics. In my opinion this tool is a lot better than Google Analytics and there is no real comparison between Google Analytics and Yahoo! Web Analytics. Yahoo! Web Analytics (IndexTools) compares more to the likes of Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends Analytics etc. There are a lot of Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics customers who do not use (or need) the full functionality of these tools and Yahoo! Web Analytics tool could be great fit for these companies.

But how do you get Yahoo! Web Analytics?

ZeroDash1 (now Ascentium) is Yahoo! Web Analytics partner and can get you started on this tool. If you are interested in learning how we might save you thousands of dollar on web analytics tool email me at batraonline at gmail.com, make sure to put “Yahoo! Web Analytics” in your subject line.

(As I was writing this post I saw Eric Peterson’s blog post that you might want to check out Yahoo Web Analytics does not compete with Google Analytics)

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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
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Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide, Assessing Vendors’ Competencies and Value

John Lovett from Jupiter Research released his new report titled Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide, Assessing Vendors’ Competencies and Value. In this report he analyzed the web analytics market and various vendors, and concluded:

The Web analytics feature race is largely over and we are left with Web Analytics providers competing on Price and Flexibility.

John provides great analysis and insights in this report but I do not fully agree with his conclusion that feature race is largely over. I believe that as new trends in web continue to emerge so is the need for new features. As Phil Kemelor, another great analyst, writes that audio and video are becoming an important part of the web, so there are clearly features needed to support their tracking. Other features currently missing are for Mobile Analytics. Mobile web is clearly gaining momentum and so is a need for Mobile Analytics. I am sure Product Managers of these tool providers are not ready to quit yet.

I do agree that most of the vendors are mostly competing on Price and Flexibility (post-data-capture segmentation, reporting on custom data elements etc.) at this time. (In my view, flexibility is also a feature though). However competing on price when there is still a lot of room for innovation and differentiation is a very myopic view by current web analytics vendor and will provide a way for someone to disrupt their business very quickly.

Satisfaction with the current tool

One of the surprising results in this report was that more than 69% of the web analytics clients have decided to stay with their current web analytics tool. This is a big change from the trend that we have seen in past. A lot of this has to do with education about web analytics tools, what they can do, how they operate and the fact that several most used features and reports are comparable in various tools.
72% of those 69% where completely satisfied with their current provider.
47% of the customer said that the biggest challenge they were trying to solve with Web Analytics tools was Vistor Segmentation. 47% also said that customer engagement was their biggest challenge.

And the Winner Is?

This report has a great 3 dimensional chart showing how different tool vendors rate in terms of business value, market suitability and breadth of company.
Omniture, Unica, and Coremetrics emerged as industry leaders for large enterprises while WebTrends, Google Analytics, IndexTools and Lyris HQ ClickTracks emerged as industry leader for small-to-midsize businesses along with the three listed for large enterprise customers.

It was surprising to see that WebTrends was not considered an enterprise tool anymore, though WebTrends was the only company to score 100% on availability of basic features. (Sidenote: A customer of ours is replacing Coremetrics and going with WebTrends).
Another surprising result was that Omniture was the overall winner even for small-to-midsize businesses.

You can get the complete report at http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/research:vision/79/id=100411


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Free Y! IndexTools

As you might already know that IndexTools, a web analytics tools that claims to offer 80% of the functionality of omniture, was acquired by Yahoo in April. Within few days after the acquisition, Yahoo announced that it will be giving away the tool for free. 2 months went by but there were no sign of Free IndexTools.

Well, last week Yahoo announced that IndexTools is available for free but it is not freely available yet. At this time, all the new account activations will have to go through existing IndexTools partners. IndexTools is limiting new accounts to ensure they have proper infrastructure and capacity to handle new accounts.

In a letter to their partners, IndexTools wrote:

We here at IndexTools are now pleased to announce that the ‘Add New Account’ function has been reactivated on your partner account, but with some limitations.
Please bear in mind that our current server capacity was based on our original projections according to where IndexTools expected to be in 2008 in regards to volume and revenue. The acquisition by Yahoo! rendered this forecast obsolete. Our number one responsibility is to ensure that our existing partners and clients are not negatively impacted by an oversubscription of accounts on the IndexTools system. These limitations will be reviewed in the coming months.
So, what are these limitations?

• You will be limited to three projects per client account—should you require more than three please contact your account manager


• We are limiting the monthly page volume to 20 million page views/month for the immediate future (this limit is per client account); data collection will occur up to that 20 million page view mark, but not beyond


• You will be able to add 5 accounts within a 30-day period ( based on former invoicing period)


• Note: all new accounts will be created as Enterprise accounts from this day forward—furthermore, as there are no longer fees there is no longer any need for trial accounts

ZeroDash1 is a partner of IndexTools and that provided me an opportunity to get free accounts. I have implemented the code on one of my customer sites and will be sharing my thoughts about free Y! IndexTools in coming weeks.

Other post on this subject
It is official: IndexTools is now free for everyone!. He started his post by saying
Y! IndexTools - Add New Web Analytics Accounts Feature reactivated!


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ZeroDash1 Partners with IndexTools

ZeroDash1, a Web Analytics, Optimization and SEM consulting company and my employer, has partnered with IndexTools, a leader among online marketing analytics platforms.

I am very excited about this partnership. Our customers rely on us to provide them deeper insights into their visitors' online behaviors and to increase their return on online marketing spend. They look to us to provide recommendations for a tool that can supply the data they require to make strategic decisions. After looking at the IndexTools' functionality and after sale support we concluded that IndexTools is an enterprise level web analytics solution that will be perfect for a lot of our clients. The functionality that IndexTools provides makes it easier to analyze the data and allows us to focus more on taking actions based on the insights we gain.

In the words of IndexToools COO Dennis R. Mortensen "I cannot overstate the timeliness and utility this partnership brings. With the impressive number of enterprise level clients that have come to us with online analytics needs in recent months, we needed a new partner with Fortune 500 experience. By joining forces with us, ZeroDash1 adds to a select group of highly qualified partners that will help us bring analysis and optimization services to both new and established IndexTools clients in North America."

About ZeroDash1
A data-driven online marketing company based in Seattle, Washington that specializes in Data Reporting, Web Analytics, Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, and Behavioral Targeting. The ZeroDash1 team brings its 35 years of business and technical experience to make clients happy by providing creative and money saving solutions to their problems.

About IndexTools
IndexTools offers a highly customizable and scalable analytics platform for companies' online marketing activity in each phase of the customer lifecycle. With IndexTools Web Analytics and Bid Management, businesses gain accurate, insightful and timely intelligence about the effectiveness of their online marketing. IndexTools' services have boosted the online performance of more than 3500 clients worldwide, including Tesco, Vodafone, PriceRunner, and John Deere.IndexTools serves its worldwide client base directly and through a network of more than 200 local partners in over 25 countries around the globe. IndexTools was founded in 2000, and operates from three offices: IndexTools Americas - New York, USIndexTools Germany, Austria & Switzerland - Frankfurt, GermanyIndexTools EMEA, Asia Pacific - Budapest, Hungary.