My friend Dennis R. Mortensen who is Vice President of Analytics at Yahoo! and one of the creators of IndexTools – that is now Yahoo! Web Analytics, gave me the news, first, tonight that LAUNCH: Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network – see his statement on his own blog, Visual Revenue, below:

Today, we are launching the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN) (please note that the link might not be active just yet).

I don’t know about you, but I personally think this is beyond exciting, and I am thrilled to see us take this (almost) final step towards full integration into Yahoo!

What is YWACN?

This is a network of third party companies with expertise in deriving insight from Web Analytics AND deploying Yahoo! Web Analytics in particular. The purpose of this network is amongst other things to help our clients get the best out of the tool – and hopefully also help us spread the gospel of YWA. It might even alleviate the stress on my personal in-box!

I can almost hear Dennis’s voice in my head as I read the beginning of his post -

We even added a few additional rock stars to that:

webanalyticsdemystified.com, semphonic.com, stratigent.com, sapient.com, purpleclick.com, thesedays.com, bitbang.it and insightr.com.

48 YWACN partners all in all – and you should be able to see (once the link is activated) a full list of YWACN partners on the YWA site. CALL them today, email them, tweet them .. heck, invite them out for dinner, they deserve it! (if you haven’t noticed, they are your new best friends)

Can I join?

Perhaps If you really excel in the field of web analytics and truly are one of those consultancies that help derive actionable insights from web analytics for your customers – we would love to hear from you.

I think the true test of weather being part of the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant network is going to help it’s members is the user base of Yahoo! Web Analytics – if it grows quickly – this can be a good way to bring value and spread the brand message – after all, Yahoo! Web Analytics, from what I know of it, is a superior platform (see  Forrester Wave Web Analytics – Then and Now) to Google Analytics – though both are roughly comparable – it’s just that Google has such a large user base – it’s difficult to make much of a dent in it – even when the product is better.

We see that with Search – there are better search engines than Google – we know this – yet the habit of using Google remains, and for many reasons, they have won the search wars – and to a large extent, the Analytics wars – at least, at the low and mid level tiers.

Perhaps, the Consultant Network will steal some fire from Google Analytics – and put more of a focus on Yahoo! – let’s hope so, anyway.