Insightr Analysis of Yahoo! Web Analytics capabilities

Last week Insightr announced our membership of the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN) and how we would be supporting clients in the Asia Pacific region adopt the powerful analytics now offered by Yahoo! to our clients. This article is a follow up to that announcement where we want to start introducing the power of YWA! to organisations who may not know so much about the ‘secret superstar’ (here’s a keyword for you: “rubix”) of web analytics.

Note to Dennis - I agree with Eric - please share Rubix with us soon! (and pray don’t tell us this exciting sounding project was cancelled with the Yahoo! acquisition)

This isn’t surprising. Back in the days before Yahoo! acquired Indextools very few users outside of Europe had been exposed to the ‘mid-range’ analytics tool (defined by its pricing model rather than capabilities) called “Indextools”. Of course there were a number of consultancies in Europe who were using Indextools for their clients and doing some tremendous work using the tool. Once Yahoo! announced the acquisition of Indextools there was immediately awareness in the industry that a new tool would be made available, and debate started over whether Yahoo! would make YWA a free tool like Google Analytics.

When I first interviewed Dennis Mortensen around the time he and his family relocated to New York after the acquisition while I still worked for Ogilvy he was unsure of where the product direction would go – though he was very much aware of the huge potential Yahoo! offered the small Indextools team. Immediately Yahoo! carried out the same tasks the Urchin team went through after their Google acquisition – platform migration to a more reliable server network and incorporation of new security policies and users/groups security.

Dennis did share with us some of his visions, which are now starting to come through with the decisions – we had a particularly long and heated discussion around media attribution and the different ways this data could be modelled, so expect something interesting to happen in this space, we also talked about the impact of being connected at a cookie level to the vast Yahoo! user network (something Microsoft didn’t quite have with their MSN Live integration in Gatineau simply because of the reach of Yahoo!) and being able to predict user interest and behaviour from this data set:

I’ll be the first to admit Yahoo! Web Analytics can be a little difficult to use after being spoilt with the slick user interfaces offered by Omniture and Google Analytics, but after a few minutes getting used to the quirks of the user interface you soon realise exactly how much power is under the hood of YWA.

Most of all we would like to send our enormous thanks to the Yahoo! team for adding Insightr to the YWACN network and for making the product free for clients to adopt. We think the strategy taken of working with consulting partners makes a lot of sense as we get under the hood of the tool; while it may upset many early adopters that YWA isn’t available to all as with Google Analytics there are plenty of consultants in the programme who are willing to share new accounts to eager testers.

Things we really like about Yahoo! Web Analytics

• Report Scheduler
• Automated Alerts
• Report Customisation and Bookmarking (full access to all metrics and dimensions)
• Chart Annotations for Analysis incorporation (for collaborative analysis amongst teams)
• Custom Calendar Events highlighting holiday / content changes
• Custom Colour Coding of Data in Tables for faster visual analysis (think Omniture Discover on Premise)
• Drill down analysis at row level in reports (think Omniture full sub-relations)
• Custom Segmentation Engine (think Omniture Discover on Demand)
• Custom Actions (Goals or Events for those used to Google or Omniture)
• Custom Variables and variable mapping
• Custom merchandising categorisation (think merchandising eVars for Omniture users)
• Scenario Analysis (think Omniture Fallout Reports)
• 200,000 row limit on data downloads (considerably larger than permitted with Google Analytics for keyword analysis)

I’ll be writing more about some of these great features as well as sharing some thoughts on how Yahoo! can make the most of the product to meet the needs of a diverse community.