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Google Web Development

Yahoo! Web Analytics

It went somewhat unnoticed, but Yahoo! today announced it’s Yahoo! Web Analytics package which is intended to compete with the wildly popular Google Analytics. I’ve spent quite a few hours in analytics packages over the years ranging from very amateurish to enterprise grade. Google Analytics is a very good product but it does have limitations. The biggest limitation is the lack of real-time reporting. Google Analytics takes a few hours, making it for most people next-day service. This isn’t a big deal for some, but if your in an environment where you need feedback on your content ASAP (a must for media sites), this is a huge deal. Yahoo is promising to deliver “within minutes”:

Get detailed reporting within minutes after an action occurs on your website. Quickly identify dips in key site metrics or monitor the performance of new content. Seeing the impact of website and marketing changes immediately makes it much easier to optimize them. Yahoo! Web Analytics also maintains historical data so you can go back at any time to review old data for new insight, or compare the present to the past without any changes to your page tags.

Interesting. I wonder if this will light a fire under Google’s butt to deliver real-time analytics as well. Urchin wasn’t really designed for real-time data. Google’s obviously done a lot of work with it to build Google Analytics. I wonder if that’s the next step for them.

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