Yahoo! Web Analytics To Be Discontinued

Yahoo! announced this week that it will be discontinuing Yahoo! Web Analytics as a stand alone product. We inquired Emer Kirrane, Product Manager for Yahoo! Web Analytics, and she answered the following:

“In line with Yahoo!’s focus on more quickly innovating with our core products and properties, over the coming quarters we are shutting down or transitioning a number of products that did not meaningfully drive revenue or engagement. After carefully reviewing our portfolio, Yahoo! has decided to discontinue Yahoo! Web Analytics services for analytics-only customers as well as the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network on October 31, to help us speed time-to-market in other areas. External YWA support will remain for Yahoo! Store customers and those using the Audience Definition feature. We will continue to share details of further changes in the months ahead.”

If you are a Yahoo! Web Analytics client, here is what you need to know:

Starting August 31, 2012, existing Yahoo Web Analytics projects will become “read-only,” with access to view historical data for two months. We recommend removing YWA tags from your website(s) at this stage, as those tags will no longer populate data to your YWA account. Also, if you wish to retain any historical data from your account, please utilize the data export functionality through your account. On October 31, 2012, all Yahoo! Web Analytics projects scheduled for discontinuation will be shut down for use, including the discontinuation of the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network for all users.

In May 9th 2008 Yahoo! bought IndexTools, a high-end product that was considered as a powerful tool by industry leaders. It was a very welcomed acquisition as it was believed that Yahoo would offer it for free, like Google Analytics did after acquiring Urchin. However, Yahoo did not make it a free-for-all product, as we can still see in the homepage of their website (screenshot below), you had to be a Yahoo client in order to get an account.

In a recent research by Stephane Hamel he found that 3% of the Top 500 US retailers were using Yahoo! Web Analytics. While this is not a large market share, Google Analytics Premium will happily welcome them.