Yahoo! Web Analytics 9.5 Launched

I am extremely happy to announce the new edition of Yahoo! Web Analytics (#YWA) which is rolling out to clients as we speak (YSM post) – an upgrade process which should be finished by end of May for everybody, you know, if we are on schedule and all. Beyond all the work one would expect in regards to general backend and scalability issues, we also had the opportunity to implement some exciting NEW features, such as:

• New Demographic Dimensions
• New Psychographic Dimensions
• New Charting Capabilities
• New Path Analysis
• New Negative-Segmentation opportunities
• New version 5 tracking code (I describe the upgrade in my Yahoo! Web Analytics book)
• ..and 30 other smaller updates like e.g. native PDF export, use up to 50 actions (goals), introduction of 38 custom fields – and purplefication of the tool, well, you probably don’t care too much about the latter. :-)

The really exciting fact is that, the Demographics Data is not just presented in pretty reports, but much more importantly, as information that you use to filter other reports with. (Note: You might remember this type of sampled data from Microsoft’s adCenter Analytics – link to Ian’s launch post)

The dimensions are Age and Gender, which have the following properties:

• Age (0-17,  18-24,   25-34,  35-54  and  55+)
• Gender (Female,  Male)

The Psychographic Dimensions, which is called Interest Groups within Yahoo! Web Analytics, hold similar characteristics as Demographics, in the sense that you can filter and segment on this data.

The Interests are categorized as follows:

• Automotive
• Consumer Packaged Goods
• Entertainment
• Finance
• Health Pharma
• Life Stages
• Miscellaneous
• Politics
• Retail
• Small Business and B2B
• Sports
• Technology
• Telecommunications
• Travel

Please note that the data in reports, based on these two new exciting dimensions, are based on Yahoo! Visitor Interest data and may not be available for all your website visitors. YWA generate the output based on a sample of your visitors with their behavioral data, and YWA will only display the numbers meeting a certain confidence level.

This confidence level reflects how confident YWA are that the sample accurately reflects the makeup of your site visitors. You can actually reduce this confidence level to see more data, where you of course have to understand that by lowering the confidence level you are viewing numbers that one should be less confident are accurate for your actual site.

We also upgraded, as you can see from the screenshots below, the actual charting and visualization area of each individual report. This included opportunity to change the default visualization for the data, the opportunity to apply other data dimensions (such as coloring a bar chart based on a metric), visualize multiple metrics at the same time, visualize the true long tail using e.g. 500 data points, Introducing Bubble Charts, introducing the opportunity to use both trend charts and bar charts at the same time, having report filters and sorting reflected in the actual visualization etc.

Well, enough talk!

One note before you go down and have a look at the screenshots; with this release YWA is opening up for managed Yahoo Search Marketing Accounts, so go CALL your account manager to get access – Don’t mind the data below, the screenshots was done in a staging environment and this post is not about the insights you can get with the new features, I’ll get to that in a later posts. I just want you to go have a look at some of the new features and preferable get excited as a marketer.

Imagine YWA being able to tell you, as a travel sector marketer, that those successful individuals who bought the trip to London in June where primarily interested in Politics, Female and between 35-54 years old. Sexy eh!?

Cheers :-)
@dennismortensen

Link to last post, when we rebranded, which includes pictures of the more general feature-set: Indextools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics

Appendix  -  (Yahoo! Web Analytics 9.5 Screenshots)

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