Yahoo on Wednesday announced the rebranding of IndexTools as Yahoo Web Analytics (beta). Currently an enterprise product, the move brings it closer to being a consumer and small business tool, although it's not available to everyone just yet.
Yahoo acquired IndexTools back in early April and promptly made it a free service. Its big advantage over Google Analytics is that the information is updated within a few minutes of user activity. In comparison, stats from Google tend to take about 24 hours, however, anyone can sign up for it. Both products feature colourful, easy-to-read charts and graphics for data reporting, deep tie-ins with each company's ad services, and a single-service user log-in that works with other company properties.
According to a post on Yahoo's blog, the updated version of the service is already out to advertisers and third-party application developers, with Yahoo Small Business users to follow. If you try to sign-up on the new site, there's simply a wait list where you can subscribe to updates. Yahoo's Director of Data Insights Dennis Mortensen says the easiest way to get your hands on this before Q4 is to become an advertiser.
You can read more about the changeover here. I've also embedded a five-minute overview of what the service did (five months ago) after the break.
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Miles Bennett - 10/02/09
Having a web analytics tool which updates within minutes isn't always a good thing because it can take 24 hours to determine sessions (aka visits / visitors). Indextools is also NOT free... currently you can't get an account unless you use Yahoo Merchant Services or know an old Indextools partner like myself.
I'd also like to point out that Indextools is limited to 20 millions page views per month where Google is limited to 5 million. If you want more than 5 million with Google then you have to use ad-words and currently due to server restrictions if you want more than 20 million in Indextools then you cant - simple.
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