Been looking at a way to compare Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics and was pointed towards a post at Insightr. Little bit like them my company helps clients using various analytics tools and like them we are constantly being asked about the difference between them.

Nordic eMarketing has been working with Google Analytics for a long time as well as being a pioneer member of the Yahoo Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN), we were a part of the first patch selected. Our Analytics clients use a mixture of Google Analytics, Omniture Site Catalyst, WebTrends, Teljari (Local player) and Yahoo Web Analytics, with the majority of new businesses adopting either GA or YWA.

Here is a great article on this matter, Should you go Google or Yahoo?

After all the rumours, Microsoft and Yahoo finally agreed to merge their search services to compete with the grand search engine, Google.

Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing will power the Yahoo search engine, while Yahoo Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft AdCenter. Yahoo rankings are going to change once it is replaced by Bing, so if Microsoft’s search offerings have not been of any concern to you before, now is the time to become familiar with it’s rules and ways to optimize your website for Bing. Bing is an open search engine to webmaster’s optimization efforts and you can get your website, even the brand new one, to be listed at the top of Bing much faster than on Google. Once your website is well ranked on Bing’s listings you can move on to optimization for Google.

 Five simple steps to get noticed on Bing: 

 1. Choose the oldest domain – the older the domain, the more chances there are of getting your site a high ranking.

2. Pick the best keywords in the title tags of every page on your website – Bing places a lot more emphasis on title tags than Google does.

3. Come up with excellent text – for Bing the amount of text on pages holds more value than it does for Google, so aim for at least 300 words.

4. Outbound links are OK – Google is cautious of the number of outbound links you have on a page whereas Bing seems to like them.

5.  Get as many backlines from relevant sites as possible – Bing’s attitude here is “the more, the merrier” but make sure the links are coming from relevant sites.

It takes time to get good rankings with Bing, so the sooner you align your website with Microsoft’s search policies, the better chance you will have to ride the wave of change to the top of Bing’s–and Yahoo’s–search results

Yahoo has announced that Nordic eMarketing is one of the companies eligibile for the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network or the YWACN, which is scheduled to launch by the end of this month.

Yahoo! Web Analytics, aka Indextools, has been upgraded to version 9.5 and is loaded with nice new features such as the user demographics and some 50 customizable actions. These are but few of the new features that we at Nordic eMarketing are learning how to use and work with in behalf of the projects we are managing.

Well first of all Yahoo! has some 550.000.000 unique visitors every month and those visitors are giving their data away by signing and out of various services such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Kelkoo (a shopping search engine which operates in 10 European countries), Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail serving over 260 million users, Yahoo! GeoCities, and Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Gallery, Yahoo! Buzz and more. This data is a sample of information collected across the Yahoo Network.

A list of some of the Yahoo! owned sites and services:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081007214624AAfLXEF and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and_services+Yahoo+owned+web+sites

The lates version of YWA is out, it’s actually the first version of the YWA after they bought Indextools and it’s called Yahoo Web Analytics 9.5. There have been some issues with the data micration, but now that the tool is through I can’t say anything else that I am liking the first version and even more so looking foward to the version number 10.

Most notible added features in the tool are the new Age and Gender demographics but I am really happy with is the Interest Group Catagories. Here Dennis Mortensen and his team at Yahoo! Web Analytics has designed a set of categories which enable the user to form a better profile of visitors to their site. The Interest Categories reports are used to show the most common Interest Groups site visitors belong to. Another “new” feature, or I should say upgraded feature is the visitor click Path analysis it’s looking much much better. It’s actually usefull now.

http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/