07

Aug

By Dennis R. Mortensen
3 comments
IndexTools, a Yahoo! Service – Discontinuation of White Label Functionality

Hi! My apologies for these somewhat boring less analytics insightful posts, I promise to get back to my useful me soon. Between me writing the Yahoo! Web Analytics Book of course – damn! harder work that I anticipated :-)

But to the meat of the matter, I received a handful of emails from partners and clients of partners lately, and had the opportunity to positively explain the changes in moving from a white-label partner to a co-branded partner. However; this morning, I received an email from a well respected person (you can comment below mate) in the Industry, who received a confusing and essentially wrong attitude on the billing status, on the partner white label status and even on the naming. So to clear things up:

1.

In regards to billing, on May 9th, Yahoo! sent a message to all clients and partners (NOT clients of partners of course) concluding:
“So moving forward from here and upon your acceptance of the Yahoo! Master Terms & Conditions and Program Terms the product will be provided to you free of charge” – I introduced this decision to great fanfare in the post IndexTools (Yahoo!) Web Analytics goes FREE!

2.

In regards to the name; I introduced the preliminary naming going forward on May 17th in my post: Name: IndexTools a Yahoo! service

3.

In regards to the change from white-label partners to co-branded partners, find the messaging, about subject, in full below. Yahoo! sent this out on August 1st. The referenced manual is not attached, but email me and I will send it to you, should you as a parter have misplaced it.

Cheers :-)
Dennis

White Label Partners

Following the IndexTools acquisition, Yahoo! has evaluated all aspects of the business and how to address its broad customer needs and has decided that providing the White Label functionality no longer corresponds to the current business model with respect to IndexTools and its Partners.
Going forwards, all White Label Partners will have to be converted to Co-branded Partners and this will entail the following functionality changes:

  • The custom domain name that your customers can currently see in their browser bar [custom domain name] when accessing their statistics will change to the following domain name https://ondemand.indextools.com. For security reasons, customers will be prompted to change their passwords, upon their first login after the domain name is implemented.
  • Data collection for all the customers of White Label Partners will be performed by using the following domain name to which you will need to point your domain name: s207.2ndx.net.
  • You will have to change the Login Form and/or Link on your websites in order to reflect the new domain name.
  • The IndexTools a Yahoo! Service logo will be displayed in the accounts of all the customers of White Label Partners.

You will be able to keep the branding of the user interface to mirror your corporate image.
The above changes will be carried out by IndexTools according to a set timeline and to transition from a White Label to a Co-branded partnership, You will be expected to instrument some changes on your side as well. To make this transition as simple as possible, we have created a step-by-step guide for you, which you will find attached.

To give you ample time to accommodate to these changes and communicate this change to your customers, this will be effective as of September 1, 2008.

The last step of this transition will take place in 2009 when White Label Partners have to change the analytics code of their customers in order to point the tracking code to the new data collection URL provided by Yahoo! We will as always inform you well in advance and will provide you with detailed instructions at that point as well.

Thank you for your cooperation in this and let us know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,
Your Partners at Yahoo!

  • http://dixonjones.com Dixon Jones

    (I’m not the guy who sent the email above by the way…!)

    Hi Dennis,

    You may have heard me wittering on about the last paragraph on that email – but just in case you didn’t, hehe:

    “The last step of this transition will take place in 2009 when White Label Partners have to change the analytics code of their customers in order to point the tracking code to the new data collection URL provided by Yahoo!…”

    Since all the partners (well – I don’t know about all, but we did at least) gave you control of a subdomain, is there not a way around this last part of the puzzle? Of course, White Label partners are physically UNABLE to change the analytics code of their customers… the customers would have to do it. As I said to Emer in an email… how much effort would it be to change code on (say) Yahoo answers? My guess is hard… and you work for Yahoo. So this is going to be a massive challenge which many just won’t bother pursuing.

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey Dixon

    Good to hear from you, I didn’t see you in San Jose last week? – you not there or me too busy? :-)
    Anywho; let me try to provide some answers to your questions, which you are more than welcome to republish.

    >>Since all the partners (well – I don’t know about all, but we did at least) gave you control of a subdomain, is there not a way around this last part of the puzzle

    You are absolutely correct in the fact that a large portion of our partners at IndexTools provided us with a sub-domain and that we could essentially create a work-around for this. This is however only one part of the puzzle and we have a task ahead of us which is partly to

    - move the tool to a yahoo.com domain
    - update the tracking script to version 5
    - update the variables to a new standard with more functionality
    - take control of the JS script (moving that from the customer and back to us)

    Any of those 4 points alone requires a code change on the page, so a workaround on 1 of them is not really going to solve much.

    I personally think that the upcoming tracking script update, the new variables and the fact the we control the JS script (thus making sure clients ALWAYS have the newest version) will bring a lot of value and assurance to the product. Have in mind that ALL direct clients will have to change the code as well.

    >>White Label partners are physically UNABLE to change the analytics code of their customers… the customers would have to do it

    Correct. But is that not a consulting task and revenue opportunity for you guys.

    >>how much effort would it be to change code on (say) Yahoo answers? My guess is hard… and you work for Yahoo. So this is going to be a massive challenge which many just won’t bother pursuing.

    This is why we announced this early and why we are slowly going to roll this out, and we do hope that the existing clients and partners see the value of the upgrade and make the effort in changing the code.

    It’s the first true _required_ code change we asked for. So I still think we are a bunch of reasonably likable people.

    Label: Dixon Jones (making sure you catch this comment in your Google Alerts, because who don’t have their name tracked by an alert system? :-)

    Cheers
    Dennis

  • http://dixonjones.com Dixon Jones

    Yes, sorry about San Jose and thanks for the reply.