Web Analytics: Google vs. Yahoo

Google Analytics & Yahoo Web Analytics Comparison

The last 12 months have seen the Google Analytics (GA) product evolve into a serious contender for a do-it-all product for most businesses, a period that has also seen Yahoo! get serious with analytics through the purchase of the not-so-well-know European product called Indextools - the decision by Yahoo! to make the Indextools product free with a rebrand into Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA) has turned the free market into a rich, dynamic, competitive space that’s seeing incredible product innovation.

Insightr Consulting are certified in Google Analytics through the Individual Certification programme as well as being a pioneer member of the Yahoo Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN). Our clients use a mixture of Google Analytics, Omniture Site Catalyst and Yahoo Web Analytics, with the majority of new businesses adopting either GA or YWA. In Singapore where we are based (and indeed across Asia) budgets for analytics are not as formalised as they are in markets like the US and Europe, so free tools are very popular here.

This article is the outcome of over 5 weeks work carrying out a feature by feature comparison of the Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics products - a project that required a large overhaul after Google announced new features on the 20th October (more examples of the product innovation we’re seeing). Yahoo Web Analytics is still a largely unknown product to business and analysts alike as the product is only available through the YWACN or via Yahoo! advertising sales teams - this comparison should give you a pretty good feel for what you’re missing.

As our friends at Yahoo would say, this is perhaps an unfair comparison - as Indextools always liked to think of the old product as 80% of Omniture at 10% of the price. They weren’t wrong. In fact as an Omniture Site Catalyst user for over 7 years (how many of you can recall SC7?) the Yahoo offering is in many ways more powerful than Site Catalyst; especially when it comes to ‘advanced’ features such as segmentation which for Site Catalyst are only available with an additional “Discover on Demand” license.

Some of you will disagree with our analysis, and particularly with our scoring system - we’re hoping that the comparison is a thought starter and something that will lead to your consideration of the YWA product as a tool worth considering. We feel the scores are fair based on our usage of products and the way our clients will use them.

So, here’s the presentation - it’s best if you view it in full screen otherwise the screenshots will be too small. We apologise for the low quality of some of the screenshots - this was required to keep the file size down. It’s also a long document, over 50 pages - but that’s because both of these tools are powerful and are feature packed! We hope you enjoy it and get value from our work:

If you like the look of Yahoo Web Analytics, and in light of the fact that you’ll need to go through a Yahoo! consultant to get access we’re offering a Google Analytics to Yahoo Web Analytics migration package for a fixed US$2,500 project cost. Here’s what we’re offering:

Insightr: The ultimate comparison between Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics; http://j.mp/2wenKg

Yahoo Buys Full Page Front Page Ad in TOI

India’s largest English-language newspaper, the Times of India, has an interesting print edition front page today – a huge yellow advertisement for Yahoo’s It’s You campaign first announced last month. You can view the print version here.

The newspaper’s circulation as of 2008 was 3.14 million, making it the largest selling English-language daily newspaper (here’s the whole list). Yahoo already has a large presence in India, reaching 26 million of the 35 million online Indians (according to Comscore, August 2009).

What does the ad mean? Who cares. It’s big and yellow. Yahoo has said it hopes to follow up on the ads by personalizing the Yahoo experience for each user.

Yahoo Will Spend More Than $100 Million To Try To Connect With You

Yahoo unveiled a new branding campaign at a press conference in New York City, centered around personalization and connecting directly with consumers. The Web company’s new tagline is, “It’s Y!ou” (with the awkward Yahoo exclamation point in there). Yahoo wants to make the Web personal and it is emphasizing the various ways it does that through the Yahoo home page, search, and individual properties. The company will be spending “more than $100 million” on this new branding campaign, CEO Carol Bartz reveals.

Yahoo is so big that the only way it can speak directly to individuals is to make the message more about them than about Yahoo. Other slogans in the new campaign include “The Internet is under new management: Yours” and “The Internet has a new personality: Yours.” Just sticking the word “you” in an ad doesn’t make it any less generic, but Yahoo hopes to follow up on this promise by personalizing the Yahoo experience for each user. This extends to search, which rolled out a number of new features more broadly which were previously being tested (including SearchAssist, and enhanced results from SearchMonkey).