FAQs

1. What is Yahoo! Web Analytics?

Yahoo! Web Analytics is designed to enable you to view, in near real-time, the experiences of visitors to your website. With Yahoo! Web Analytics you can understand how visitors get to your site, what they do while there, how many and which ones take different kinds of actions, and where possible the benefit and cost of each lead.

Yahoo! Web Analytics helps you identify the ads, campaigns, keywords and referrals that contribute the most to your bottom line. It helps you understand what pages, content and products perform better than others, thereby helping you maximize customer engagement and product merchandising on your site, as well as structure your site to optimize task completion rates. And by providing valuable metrics about customers’ experiences on your website, Yahoo! Web Analytics can help you allocate time and budget better, , increase visitor engagement and satisfaction, convert more visitors into customers, and transform existing customers into loyal fans.

2. How is Yahoo! Web Analytics different than other analytics products?

Yahoo! Web Analytics is different from other analytics solutions in three key areas:

1. The Power of Raw Data: While some products store aggregated data, which restricts the usefulness of the data to pre-created or canned reports, Yahoo! Web Analytics stores data in non-aggregated raw form. This means that you can ask a variety of new questions and create new kinds of reports to answer questions with current and historical data. In other words, Yahoo! Web Analytics is not a simple aggregated data reporting tool, it is a powerful data analysis tool.

2. The Flexibility of Raw Data: Yahoo! Web Analytics enables easier analysis of website data by allowing you to filter and segment data using intuitive drag-and-drop features, to quickly build reports with simple custom report wizards, and to create ad hoc scenarios to answer your specific business questions as they arise.

   Yahoo! Web Analytics is easy to implement and highly customizable. Our JavaScript coding can be customized to capture up to 38 different custom fields, and can track any kind of AJAX, Flash or Video. Once you have added our JavaScript code to your pages, you can create new funnels or change how products or actions are referenced in reporting through the user interface rather than with cumbersome changes to the tracking code. You can track up to 50 different on-site actions, 15 different pre-configured funnels, and 15 more ad hoc funnels if you think of new click paths you would like to analyze after the data has already been collected.

3. The Value of Real-time Data: While some analytics products provide data 24-48 hours after it is collected, Yahoo! Web Analytics reflects data within minutes of collection. With Yahoo! Web Analytics, you can practically see what your website users are experiencing as it happens! This is extremely powerful if you’d like to monitor how brand new marketing campaigns are performing or whether recent website changes are leading to deeper, more engaging, more profitable visits.

3. Is Yahoo Web Analytics available for everybody?

It is somewhat expected that since Yahoo! Web Analytics is following the path of FREE that we are moving towards offering YWA to everyone. The fact is that Yahoo has never intended to make Yahoo Web Analytics free for the masses. The solution is not for everybody – it is probably overkill for most small businesses and personal websites that need a simple analytics product to give high level basic information about their website, and there are other products on the market perfectly suitable for those website owners.

Yahoo! Web Analytics is focused on Yahoo’s bigger advertisers and publishers who really want raw data they can mold, analyze and integrate with other enterprise data to find advanced levels of marketing and website insight. This is not just a marketing strategy; this is also how we have developed and keep developing the product. We think this makes a lot of sense and our customers really like this select approach.

4. How can I gain access?

In April, Yahoo! will be releasing Yahoo! Web Analytics version 9.5, which includes a number of new features for mid-to-large online marketers, SEMs and agencies. New features include:

• Visitor demographic and psychographic dimensions: age, gender, and subject affinities
• New data charting capabilities to better visualize advanced custom reports
• The ability to add notes to charts and graphs and then export annotated charts as PDF reports
• New dashboard features and dashboard cloning capabilities
• New user access settings

Yahoo! Web Analytics is most appropriate for large enterprises with complex analytics needs that have the resources to set up and track analytics, and to analyze the data collected for marketing or website insights. Web Analytics provides detailed information about how visitors get to your site, where they go and what they do while there, how many and which ones take different kinds of actions, where possible, the revenue benefit and cost of each lead, and much more. Website owners that spend a significant amount of time and money driving traffic to their site from multiple channels, such as search engines, email campaigns, display campaigns, etc., and who want to tie various website outcomes to traffic sources in order to optimize their website and marketing investments and improve visitor engagement and conversion rates should consider Yahoo! Web Analytics. Advertisers that manage PPC campaigns on Google, Yahoo, and/or MSN can also import campaign information and get a holistic view across all of their SEM campaigns.

Speak with your Yahoo! account team for information on how to gain access.

If you are a YSM customer, but are not managed by a Yahoo! account team or do not have the resources to instrument your site and analyze the data for advanced levels of website visitor insight, you may still be interested in one of Yahoo’s two flavors of YSM Analytics.

YSM Conversion-Only Analytics
If you are doing Search Engine Marketing the YSM Conversion-Only Analytics tag is designed to show you how many conversions result from clicks that are generated by your Yahoo! campaign. In addition to conversions, you’ll be able to see total revenue generated by the conversions (if set up to pass constant or dynamic revenue value). By placing the Conversion-Only javascript tag into any webpage that signifies a conversion event has occurred, such as a sale, form completion, or email signup, you can track in your Yahoo! reports how successful your ads are at generating leads or sales for your business. You can then use this information to help optimize your ads. You can also measure KW Assists, keywords that did not directly lead to a conversion but were searched prior to the keyword that led to the conversion and thus may be valuable to you.

Learn more about Conversion-only Analytics.
Learn more about KW Assists

YSM Full Analytics
Search marketers that want not only conversion tracking, but also a little more information about how many people make it to each stage in the conversion process, OR may be interested in not just KW Assists but also Assists from other types of campaigns - such as Display Ads, Email, Paid Inclusion, or other search engines – in their YSM reporting, should try YSM Full Analytics. Yahoo! is the only search engine that provides a multiple channel attribution metric (Display Assists)!

Learn more about Full Analytics.
Learn more about Display Ad Assists (NEW)

If you have reviewed Yahoo Web Analytics and think that YWA is right for you, email ywa-inquiries@yahoo-inc.com. In your email, please provide your YSM ID(s), the URL(s) you are interested in tracking, and a little about what you would like to do with Y! Web Analytics. As Yahoo! adds new system capacity, we will evaluate your request and contact you with more information.

If you are not a customer of Yahoo! Search Marketing, Yahoo! Small Business, Yahoo! Display Advertising, Right Media, or Blue Lithium, but are interested in increasing traffic and increasing transparency into the value of your traffic, please visit advertising.yahoo.com and sign up for the type of service right for your business. Yahoo! customers who have had an active account for at least 3 months may apply to ywa-inquiries@yahoo-inc.com to request a YWA account (see process above).

If you would just like to stay informed as we continue to expand our services to new groups of Yahoo customers and partners, please register for updates on the Yahoo! Web Analytics home page or sign up for twitter announcements at http://twitter.com/ywa.

5. Where can I find authorized Y! Web Analytics Consultants?

The Y! Web Analytics Consultant network is launching June 1, 2009. For more information on how to become a YWA Consultant or for a list of Consultants, please visit www.analytics.yahoo.com/support.

6. Where can I find more information on how best to use Y! Web Analytics?

Over 500 FAQ’s and best practices are available at helpcenter.yahoo.com.

You might also be interested in "Yahoo! Web Analytics: Tracking, Reporting, and Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights", which contains best practices about Yahoo! Web Analytics and how to use it to optimize your online business.