It’s been eagerly awaited for several months now, and I admit, I knew something was about to be announced on Monday night when I spoke with Dennis Mortensen while at SMX East, here in New York. I wasn’t quite sure what was going to be announced, but I had my suspecions, and this was it.  According to Dennis, in his VisualRevenue Blog -  IndexTools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Yea! Now lets get on and take a look at what Yahoo! Analytics is going to be offering, under the covers, so to speak.  So what is Yahoo! Analytics offering that I think is useful or new above what anyone else is offering, at the price (free):

Real Time Segmentation - not offered by any other free platform – up till now you had to pay a lot to get the ability to segment data – and that’s what makes Analytics powerful.  Today, it’s almost a must have,  if your going to try to answer any serious marketing question – to be able to segment the data.

There’s also a Live Cost Analysis report that may be able to be morphed into something else – and appears to offer a capability Google Analytics, Yahoo! Analytics main competitor, doesn’t yet offer (see below):

Right now, I don’t think Google gives you any “non-Google” campaign data – up till now, maybe they didn’t need to.  I bet that decision is being reconsidered now.

Merchandise Reporting – Dennis mentioned, and I’ve known this for a while, that Yahoo! Analytics, be default, supports Yahoo! Store, Yahoo! Developers (Y!OS) and Yahoo! Head Advertisers (Microsites).  Yahoo! had the Yahoo! Stores for a while, and while they were often awful to optimize for SEO/SEM, they were often a great place to create an online store (if you didn’t get too ensnared with the Yahoo! Store template limitations) – but you could not get any kind of decent Analytics from the Yahoo! Store, last I heard – and now you can.   Google can’t compete here, because it doesn’t have stores  – that’s one place Google never went.

Getting the Analytics down to the SKU level – that comes out of the box now – you have a Yahoo! Store, you get the full support of Yahoo! Analytics.  Impressive.

Scenario Analysis – Many higher end platforms have Scenario Analysis – Google Analytics doesn’t have it – but you can set up something similar with Goals, still, this looks better than what GA offers.

Path Analysis – you can continue to drill down, just as you can in CoreMetrics – Google Analytics does not support this functionality today.

The Email Alerts (Marketing Workflow Management) are well beyond what Google offers today, though Coremetrics, for example, does provide this, as I recall, when I worked with it.   You can monitor events and send an email out when a threshold is reached.

You can read more about Yahoo! Analytics on VisualRevenue

IndexTools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics