It was only a matter of time before Yahoo made the call to close down its Yahoo Web Analytics platform and last week that day finally arrived. After fighting for several years to build market share following is 2008 acquisition of IndexTools, the platform like MSN Analytics never really got critical mass. One critical misstep Yahoo Analytics made was to have their platform closed to just Yahoo Hosted eCommerce customers and those with a large Yahoo Advertising spend.
Yahoo Web Analytics fought against both Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics and Webtrends and managed to maintain its ground but never grow it as much as it needed. It’s surprising considering the entrance of Adobe and IBM into the web analytics space that Yahoo Web Analytics was never sold off to an aggressive social media marketing company such as Salesforce.com, Facebook or Linkedin.
As Yahoo Web Analytics closes down, Google Analytics continues to expand its reach. According to BuiltWith Google Analytics is now distributed across 72% of the top 1,000,000 websites. It’s interesting that Yahoo Analytics still tracks around 3.85% of these top 1,000,000 sites, so now these customers will had to decide if they move to Omniture, Piwik, GetClicky or Google Analytics.
Starting on the 31st August 2012 all Yahoo Web Analytics projects will switch off importing data and only allow “read-only” and have advised website owners to remove YWA tags from all their websites. There will be 2 more months of the ability to view historical data before all YWA projects will be scheduled for discontinuation and the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network will be shutdown.
So if you have a custom setup of YWA you might be having a bad month, and you need to utilise their data export functionality before 31st October 2012.
Big companies never learn and Yahoo! really doesn’t get it. How do they think they “promoted” it? Most people – even many Yahoo! store owners – barely even knew it existed. There has been next to no buzz across any blog community or social network I’m involved in – and I spend most of my waking hours online.
If any company wants something to take off they MUST get the word out! If they assume that their potential users are reading their blog and buzz page they’re asleep at the wheel. People are busy and the world does NOT revolve around you – no matter how big you think you are.
When you have something as complex as analytics you have to get a core group to start using and writing how-tos about it. You have to offer videos and courses AND PROMOTE THOSE where people who are early adopters will see them.
If any of that happened with Yahoo! Analytics it was way too little. Yahoo! has consistently shot themselves in the foot. IndexTools was a great analytics program. Most bloggers loved MyBlogLog. If they hadn’t killed the later they could have used it to promote the former.
And don’t even get me started on the way the massacred their original Pay Per Click platform that not only worked – it CONVERTED! They had the lead – and they blew it trying to copy Google. Giant FAIL – so epic that I have to wonder if it was not intentional.