Madan Sheina
Yahoo hungry for web analytics?
Is Yahoo finally getting serious about web analytics? Last week the Internet giant agreed to buy Hungarian maker of online marketing analytics tools firm, Tensa, which is better known as IndexTools. Financial details of the deal, which is expected to close in June, were not disclosed. Yahoo gets its hands on IndexTools analytics and bid management technologies and Tensa's R&D subsidiary. The addition of the IndexTools software is intended to bolster the existing services that Yahoo offers to online advertisers with monitoring, analysis and metrics of website traffic performance for marketing optimisation.Comment: Yahoo has its eyes on IndexTool's technology for analysing client's online marketing efforts. The software adds capabilities that deliver insights and metrics for online campaigns that run across its entire Web network to Yahoo's current web analytics platform, which is based on a set of analytic tools inherited through its 2003 acquisition of Overture. Overture had in turn purchased Keylime Software's analytic and paid-search management tools and is currently used as the foundation for the 'Full Analytics' option that's part of Yahoo's new Panama search-marketing system. The branding might have changed but Yahoo has not really evolved the Keylime tools that much.IndexTools will hopefully change that. It should also sharpen Yahoo's web analytics focus on small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). Yahoo hopes to target the software at the 150,000 odd SMBs that are marketing online through Yahoo properties right now. Later this year Yahoo intends to enable third-party developers to monitor and optimise the traffic performance of their applications.This acquisition is highly complementary to Microsoft's forthcoming advertising management platform called AMP, which is expected later this year. AMP promises to provide online marketers with a single interface to buy search, display, mobile, local and video ads across Yahoo's web properties and those of its premium ad partners like AT&T, eBay and Viacom. With Google steaming ahead in the online advertising space, it's important that Yahoo gets the AMP roll-out out on time, especially as its last major ad system upgrade (the “Panama” search marketing ranking system) was hit by delays.Yahoo continues to keep its acquisitive appetite even as it battles a hostile $44.6 billion takeover bid by Microsoft. That's because on another front it's battling to distinguish itself from Google (or more precisely Urchin Software) on several other fronts, including online advertising and now web marketing optimisation. Yahoo has been behind on both counts and needs to catch up. And remember Microsoft also has its “Gatineau” or Microsoft adCenter Analytics service up its sleeve in beta as well.However, unlike Google Analytics, Yahoo doesn't offer a free analytics package. Nor is it likely that Yahoo will make the IndexTools free either. The approaches are also different as well. Whereas Yahoo aims to offer marketers and IT with a narrowly focused set of stats and graphs on web search engine performance, Google's analytic lens is more fish-eye, providing a more comprehensive range of website activity, from visitor data, page views, conversion funnels, cross-segmentation, geo-targeting, and so on, rather than just search engine activity. That breadth is really down to its Urchin origins. IndexTools will make up some lost ground. But there's still plenty of daylight between Yahoo and Google when it comes to web analytics.
