Yahoo buys Indextools – YAHOO!

The recent news of Yahoo buying Indextools gives me plenty to look forward to – it’s an exciting development in the world of web analytics which will stirr up things and bring about another shift.

As with Google Analytics, there’s a catch – only sunshine is free these days! By offering users a free web analytics tool that currently competes with the likes of Omniture and WebTrends, Yahoo are cunningly luring advertising dollars into their Yahoo Search Marketing program.

Whether or not this is a smart move is yet to be proven as far as I’m concerned. I mean, yes, it’s a very attractive offer for search marketers who are “measure-analyze-action” conscious, but if Yahoo don’t improve YSM, will these guys start investing more? In most niches marketers know AdWords provides better ROI and higher conversions on a global scale, whilst YSM competes mostly on US-targeted campaigns, (at least that’s what I’ve heard from several people in the industry).

I’ve demoed Indextools a while back and I have to say that these guys definitely know what their doing but imho, at the time they focused a little too much on usability rather than flexibility. Nevertheless, Indextools offers loads more possibilities and I wonder how Google will respond to this.

Considering Yahoo probably invested quite heavily (Indextools are up there with the big names and customer brands) I imagine the tool will be provided for free, with a few buts. One of those buts could well be premium pay for support/consultant fees and Yahoo could possibly go for a tiered-level access, providing only a certain amount of functionality for free. Time will tell.