Your answers on Diana’s question are interesting. By making ITools free, the 2 goals Yahoo may have is
1. to generate more revenues from panama
2. gain market share.

To do so, there should be a real added value : why using Index Tools instead of Google Analytics ? GA is deep anchored on the market thanks to a strong integration of Adwords, and other products to come.
one idea : the panama content network => giving more to publishers using panama content index tools, more than Adsense, for the ones using index tools, to attract the biggest ones. And this is where I agree with you : index tool could help in maximizing CTR on panama content, doing a little bit of adserving to display the optimal ads based on user behavior and/or panel. Analysing the source of trafic to display contextual ads not only based on the content of the site but also based the search query or any other source that led to the website. But on this point, I have already seen nice examples with adsense. And with Doubleclick I guess Google will help its publishers as well

Probably wrong from the beginning but it’s fun to try to guess

Julien

@Xman: flippe pas Xavier, tu vas y arriver

@Thomas:
Merci d’avoir enrichi la réflexion. Mon expérience auprès de bon nombre de clients de Google a souvent été comme tu le décris. L’implémentation d’un outil devient une fin en soit et finalement ce n’est pas bien grave si on ne met plus jamais le nez dedans par la suite.

Mon ancien homologue au UK, Philip Walford, décrit ce phénomène dans un de ses posts: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-you-start-is-as-important-as-how.html
« It’s easy, when setting up web analytics on a site, to regard the numbers themselves as the ultimate goal. You may rush to simply get the code on your site and see reports populated with data. It’s easy to perceive the challenge as a technical one, a question of how to apply a tag to a page, rather than a theoretical and organizational one. This is an understandable, but sometimes misguided focus. »

I’ve been wondering the exact same… and unfortunately I have more interrogations than answers.
Now, I could be entirely wrong on some or even all of this, but for what it’s worth, here are a few ideas that have come to me over the past couple of weeks:

1. It seems clear to me that Google definitely has more to gain through Google Analytics by driving increased revenue to AdWords than Yahoo! could possibly hope with Panama. Google’s overwhelming leadership in Search Engine Marketing, makes this possible. People won’t simply quadruple their investments on Panama because they have a new Analytics tool that integrates nicely with it (AGAIN, this is just my half-baked gut reaction)

2. What further substantiates this is the recent news that Yahoo! will be testing running AdWords on its US search result pages for 3% of queries to see if they can make more money that way. Weird timing, right?

3. Because of richer features, IndexTools is most probably going to be a good whack more resource-intensive for Yahoo! to provide than Google Analytics is for Google

Based on all this, I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that the source of revenue that they see in IndexTools must lie elsewhere…
Could be using the data for some revolutionary ad-targeting tom-foolery, could be to produce a massive virtual panel and knock heads with likes of Comscore. Of course it most probably has nothing to do with any of this and I’m jsut plain wrong

At any rate, I think we may find the answer whenever the Terms and Conditions come out…

La question qui vient avant, c’est même : “pourquoi aurais-je envie d’aller jeter un coup d’oeil à mon outil de webanalyse” ? Nombre de clients ont l’outil, mais rien ne les y incite réellement à s’en servir. La deuxième question est donc “qu’est-ce que je vais pouvoir y trouver” ? Dans l’idéal, c’est 1)un executive summary avec des indicateurs métiers pertinents 2)une possibilité de travailler la données (segmentation, tcd, …) si je souhaite creuser un peu plus à des fins d’optimisation marketing / ergonomique.

Effectivement, cette annonce est une vraie bonne nouvelle… Mais comme tu le précises bien – entre outil et process, c’est toujours le process qui doit primer ! D’où le besoin de consultants sur le sujet.

Well done.

Google have always tried to be transparent in why they offer a free service and still continue to meet privacy concerns – however it will be interesting to see what customer perception is regarding data privacy and Yahoo.

Thanks!