As its latest attack to Google's supremacy in the search engine business, Yahoo! recently launched its own Web Analytics tool, a Web application enabling website owners to track and analize detailed visitor data and statistics to optimize revenue that is similar to its Google-branded counterpart, although with many key differences and innovations.

Earlier this year, in May, Yahoo! acquired a Web service company named IndexTools: Analytics is the result of such acquisition and months of product development. The tool is currently in its beta stage, and will be gradually rolled out in the coming months to about 13,000 small businesses featuring an e-commerce site. In fact, Analytics is targeted specifically to business partners that will use the tool to evaluate market performance and tweak the website design to optimize click-through rates.

Jitendra Kavathekar, VP of Yahoo! Web Analytics, explained in a blog post that the product will be rolled out in different phases, starting this week and for the remainder of 2008 into next year. Still according to Kavathekar, Analytics is already available to selected advertisers looking to build custom micro-sites and application developers building Web-based software through the Yahoo Developer Network.

Compared to Google's product, Yahoo! Web Analytics' most prominent difference is its real-time reporting capabilities: according to its homepage, detailed reporting as well as the results of user-defined queries will be available to see within minutes, allowing its users to get almost istantaneous feedback and modify the site whenever needed with a much shorter "test cycle" than they would be able to achieve with Google Analytics.

Other minor differences between the two competing products are mainly the reflection of their substantially different focuses. Web Analytics, being business-oriented, also allows for multi-user access, advanced reports on sales — such as

grouping/sorting by price or other arbitrary fields — as well as CPC (cost per click), CPM (cost per impression), CPA (cost per acquisition) and ROI (return over investment) estimations, grouping and analysis based on hierarchically organized categories, comparative reporting and much more.

In the site FAQ, Yahoo sums up the main advantages against its competitors in three main points, not without indirectly hinting at Google Analytics as a somewhat inferior product:

  • Real-time data: "While some analytics products provide data 24-48 hours after collection, Yahoo! Web Analytics reflects data within minutes of collection. In other words, with Yahoo! Web Analytics, you can practically see in real-time what your website users are experiencing. This is extremely powerful compared to seeing what users did 2 days ago."
  • Raw data: "While some products store aggregated data, which restricts the usefulness of the data to pre-created or canned reports, Yahoo! Web Analytics stores data in non-aggregated raw form. This means that you can ask a variety of new questions and create new kinds of reports to answer questions using both current and historical data."
  • Ease of use and flexibility: "[Analytics] enables easier analysis of website data by allowing you to filter and segment data using intuitive drag-and-drop features [and] to quickly build reports with simple custom report wizards."

In a blog post appeared on his personal website, Dennis R. Mortensen, Chief Operating Officer at IndexTools (now Yahoo! Web Analytics) explains that Analytics is an evolution of what was already being offered by the company prior to the acquisition, and that the product has seen improvements mainly in terms of a better scalability.

In conclusion, while not new to the market (but rather a revamp of a previous product), Yahoo! Web Analytics could become a worthy competitor of its Google-branded counterpart, at least judging from the press releases: unfortunately, it won't be easy to see it in action, both because of the gradual release process it is undertaking, and because of the narrower market it targets when compared to Google Analytics.