Finally Yahoo! Launched its 9.5 version, which is the first Yahoo! Version of Indextools. This version is full of Dennis Mortensen touches something normal since the project is still under his hands.
The first thing that you note when you login this new version is that the entire front end looks much more sexy. The “landing page” has a Line Chart with Visits, Visitors and Pageviews. At the botom you will find the numbers of Visit, Visitors, Page Views, Avg. Page Views, Av. time spent on site, Bounce Rate and New Visits.
Then you will be surprised by the new report menu. When I say a new report menu I mean, on one hand it has a different distribution of current reports and on the other hand some completely brand new reports.
One of my preferred features is the “Add event“one. You can drag and drop a callout icon into any chart and write what happened in that particular moment or time period. It is really simple and useful since add lot of relevance to the analyzed information.
However they need to improve the interaction Chart/Event because the information become a little confuse when you add several events in the same chart.
One of the most announced features was the Demographic segmentation. I also found it very interesting but I would like to carry on an in depth analysis before saying my verdict. On the other hand I think it is a very interesting feature that help the overall analysis but it wont (as most of the former offline marketers think) change your life.
The custom report interface hasn’t changed and that’s a good thing in my opinion, I love it. It’s flexible and allow you creating almost any report you can imagine. In the following screenshot there is an example where we analyze the quality of a particular user (the same user id we have in our database).
To the above mentioned flexibility of creating reports you now also count with chart flexibility. You can choose the best way you want to visualize your reports as in the following screenshot.
Fortunately the 9.5 version still has the “Last visitor detail” report. Non-Indextools users are probably not very familiar with this report but what it does is give you information about every particular user navigating you website and not an average. For instance you can filter users that visited a particular product (without conversion) and export the ID’s of those users to the Email marketing tool and invite them to buy the product with a discount.
You can integrate into Yahoo! Web Analytics all your PPC campaign information from Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter, Yahoo! EU and/or Yahoo! US just adding your account information into the Yahoo! Web Analytics Interface.
Pros
– Flexibility.
– WIth focus on integration.
– Real time information.
– Identify information from a particular user (login).
– Excellent dashboard functionality.
– Excellent custom report funcionality.
Cons
– Require some level of expertise for both implementation and customization.
– The process of adding a new user to any account is not very friendly. Require an unnecessary double check. You invite someone, this person accept it and you need to accept them again.
– The “events” are added with callouts into the chart, something good when you add just one, but it becomes chaotic when you add several of them.
If you are familiar with Google Analytics will probably takes you some time until you feel completely comfortable with this interface since is not very similar. Not better not worse, just different.