Hardly a week has passed that Yahoo quickly decided to generate more buzz around its rival Google Analytics tool with its recently acquired IndexTools web analytics service for FREE.
But, before rushing over to this post at the IndexTools web site, there are some requirements to the offer.
“According to the IndexTools blog, the service is presently being provided free only to clients and partners only if they accept a new Yahoo agreement.”
“Today we will communicate that we will require our partners and clients to accept a new standard Yahoo! agreement and that Yahoo! (we) currently intends to provide the service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the Yahoo! Agreement,” IndexTools COO Dennis Mortensen said on his VisualRevenue blog.
“It is however important to note that our clients and partners must accept this agreement to continue using the service,” he continued. “I think this is a fair tradeoff for an enterprise class web analytics system.”
For a long time, IndexTools is one of the industry’s finest kept secrets. It is indeed one of the most powerful web analytics applications that lets’ you perform some amazing stuff.
Eric Peterson called the agreement a likely game changer when it was announced. He also anticipated IndexTools would be free by Christmas 2008, and Yahoo proved that wager correct.
Apart from Yahoo and Google rivalry on web analytics goes, another firm in the field sees the competition shaping up that way. Omniture observed on this in a blog post, stating it was great to see Yahoo get back into web analytics.
“Yahoo’s intention with this possession is evidently to provide a service to their thousands of small business customers. These customers would have otherwise shifted to Google for their “free” analytics solution,” wrote Omniture’s Brent Hieggelke.
IndexTools not only fulfills the need for Yahoo as a tech offering, but as a way to learn a lot more about how people interact with the IndexTools-using sites they visit.
This act by Yahoo, though not a big surprise in light of what Google and Microsoft has already done, will certainly rip the covers off IndexTools as an industry secret, and truly bring it into the limelight.