Yahoo are getting into the Analytics Business

[Anna-Jayne Metcalfe]

I spotted this news item this morning in the CodeProject Insider:

http://ycorpblog.com/2008/10/08/introducing-yahoo-web-analytics/

Excerpt:

"Born out of our acquisition of IndexTools in May, Yahoo! Web Analytics (beta) provides powerful data and insights reporting that help website owners evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs. They’ll get custom real-time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to ramp up their visitor satisfaction.

It seems like two questions arise here:

1. Has anyone here any experience of IndexTools, and what do/did you think of it? How does it compare to Google Analytics, for example?

2. If you are using Google Adwords, and there any risks in using the two together, bearing in mind Google and Yahoo's recent collaborations over web advertising (I'm assuming running Yahoo Analytics with their equivalent to Adwords is a bad idea).

More information at http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/

Discuss.... ;)

[Keith Maurino]

I was actually in the web analytics business for a number of years before Google purchased Urchin and made it the free service now know as Google Analytics, which pretty much put us out of business. I knew all of the big companies in the web analytics business at the time but I have never heard of IndexTools until today. So, I'm not sure how much of a following or presence they have in the business.

From looking at there website there is one thing that I do like over Google Analytics. That is real-time monitoring. As you probably know, with Google Analytics you have to wait until the next day to see any of your stats. The real-time stats would be a big advantage over Google.

Regarding your second question, I was not sure what you meant. Did you mean, do you think it would be safe to run both Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics on the same site? If so, then yes that is perfectly fine. Many websites do this from time to time to make sure that they are actually getting reliable statistics from there current web analytics provider.