WebProNews

Google Analytics has some free competition, as Yahoo decided to open up the web analytics part of its latest acquisition for free to IndexTools clients and partners. We speculate as to why they are doing this.

Yahoo wasted little time in generating more buzz around its IndexTools purchase. The web analytics toolset of IndexTools becomes available for free today.

"Today we will communicate that we’ll require our partners and clients to accept a new standard Yahoo! agreement and that Yahoo! (we) currently intends to provide the service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the Yahoo! Agreement," IndexTools COO Dennis Mortensen said on his VisualRevenue blog.

"It is however important to note that our clients and partners must accept this agreement to continue using the service," he continued. "I think this is a fair tradeoff for an enterprise class web analytics system."

Eric Peterson called the deal a potential game changer when it was announced. He also guessed IndexTools would be free by Christmas 2008, and Yahoo proved that wager correct.

As far as Yahoo and Google competing on web analytics goes, another firm in the field sees the competition shaping up that way. Omniture commented on this in a blog post, saying it was great to see Yahoo get back into web analytics.

"Yahoo’s motive with this acquisition is clearly to provide a service to their thousands of small business customers. These customers would have otherwise migrated to Google for their ‘free’ analytics solution," wrote Omniture's Brent Hieggelke, to whom we must recommend using the Return key from time to time when writing his posts (whitespace is a good thing, folks.)

The comparison to Google's free service should be extended beyond an apples to apples look at web analytics. IndexTools could benefit Yahoo in the way Urchin/Analytics benefits Google.

If Yahoo's management of IndexTools permits the company to look at client data for their websites, and we're willing to bet that will be in the new service agreement Mortensen noted, IndexTools not only fills a need for Yahoo as a tech offering, but as a way to learn a lot more about how people interact with the IndexTools-using sites they visit.