Archive for October, 2008

We were waiting for this since Yahoo! acquired IndexTools in April. After six months, Dennis R. Mortensen announced it four days ago: IndexTools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics.

In his post Dennis explains that this re-branding […] also includes the launch of a new website and changes to the analytics product itself (sic) including support of Yahoo! Store, Yahoo! Developers and Yahoo! Head Advertisers.

Unfortunately, as anticipated in April, this is not a free-for-all-come-and-get-it launch, but a carefully planned controlled access launch only for former IndexTools customers.

You can see few screenshots on the official Yahoo! Web Analytics  website.

Everybody agrees to say this is the biggest financial crisis the world has ever known. Even worse than the big one of 1929. And they are probably right.
I won’t do a long analysis of it here as lots of bright economists do that much better than me but honestly, what better times than a financial crisis for a web analyst?

Of course, crisis means recession, investments will be freezed or at least will slow down, non-necessary activities will see their budget aborted, probably very few companies (except the pure internet players) will spend money to improve their internet solutions and web analysts will be amongst the firsts to suffer from the situation.

But don’t you think this crisis can be a good opportunity to improve the internet presence of any company willing to have the best return on their online investments?
Times are difficult?
Budgets are smaller?

Let’s optimize the investments done in online marketing and communication!

It’s time to optimize (or put in place) the necessary mechanisms to measure the effectiveness of our web sites in order to better target our audience, to better understand our visitors and to refine our web sites to ultimately better serve (and satisfy) our customers.

The next months will be difficult for all of us, it is time to work on tools and process which will give us the necessary competitiveness and will help us to minimize the effects of the crisis.

Yes, definitely, times are not so bad for web analysts.