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press release Wrote:Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire substantially all of the assets of Tensa Kft., more commonly known as IndexTools, a leading provider of Web analytics software for online marketing. The acquisition includes IndexTools' Web analytics business and technology as well as its Tensa R&D Kft. subsidiary. Upon completion of the acquisition, the addition of the IndexTools' assets is intended to expand Yahoo!'s powerful set of services designed to maximize its clients' online marketing efforts.

"Yahoo! believes that the ability to generate the most valuable and relevant insights is essential to seizing market opportunities and creating successful campaigns," said Bassel Ojjeh, senior vice president and head of Yahoo!'s Strategic Data Solutions group. "We expect that the IndexTools' technology platform will provide our customers the opportunity to more quickly uncover and act on these insights, enhancing Yahoo!'s status as a partner of choice in online marketing and the must buy for the world's advertisers."

The acquired technology is expected to extend Yahoo!'s current analytics offerings by adding capabilities to deliver relevant insights and metrics for online campaigns that run across the entire Yahoo! network. Following the acquisition, the first group of customers to benefit from these enhanced tools will be more than 150,000 small-to-medium businesses marketing on the Web with Yahoo!. Additional capabilities enabling third-party developers to monitor and optimize the traffic performance of their applications are expected to follow throughout the year following the acquisition...

Quote:Many people consider IndexTools to be every bit as good as far more expensive solutions, offering strong support for visitor segmentation, customization, marketing workflow management, advanced merchandising, and reporting that is far superior to that currently offered by other free and low-cost solutions. In fact, IndexTools is often referred to as “Omniture at a fraction of the cost” and having used both applications I’m hard pressed to disagree — everything you need to do “Enterprise” (sic) analytics is in IndexTools, without exception...

Quote:Summary:
Yahoo! currently intends to provide the IndexTools Web Analytics service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the standard Yahoo! agreement...

Quote:Yahoo is getting into the analytics game with the launch of a new traffic measuring tool. Yahoo Web Analytics builds on the IndexTools system acquired by the company in April. The rebranded platform is currently available in beta mode only to registered Yahoo Small Business customers and a small subset of advertisers. A wider rollout, however, is planned for the future.

Like other traffic tools in the market, Yahoo Web Analytics offers a variety of data analysis options at no direct cost. Unlike its Google-based competitor, though -- on which data is delayed by several hours -- Yahoo's tool provides the numbers in real-time, letting clients see immediate and up-to-the-minute usage information, says Yahoo...

Quote:Watts of Organize.com pays attention to conversion rates on merchandising for cost analysis to see if the ads are going in the right place. In addition, he said measuring cost-per-click on the cost-analysis tool is useful.

Store owners said they made good use of the last-visitor info Yahoo provides. Watts said he likes to know which search engines customers used to get to Organize.com. "This tool is great for analyzing and solving tactical issues immediately," agreed Shirilla. " I can watch the path of a client from search engine, landing page, product page, and hopefully a successful checkout."

Another advantage of using Analytics for the store owners is the synergy of having a store on Yahoo and using the company's Analytics service. According to Watts, this makes the data more accurate. "The data is more accurate because it's bundled into the same package used for the store," he explained...