Yahoo better than Google in web analytics? May be.

Looks like it’s time for Google to step aside and give way for Yahoo. At least Yahoo web analytics needs more attention from a world monopolized by Google Analytics.

Yahoo’s acquisition of  Intex tools (now Yahoo Analytics) in 2008 is worth a lot more than we think. Viewed in a business perspective, Yahoo web analytics has more features than Google web analytics. But the greatest drawback with Yahoo Analytics is, it is available only for Yahoo’s small business and advertising customers.

According to an recent research from CMS Watch, Yahoo web analytics performs well in some key areas than Google web analytics. A few features that make Yahoo have an edge over Google:

• Access control options and approach to multi-site analytics
• Monthly page-view limits (200MM for Yahoo! vs. 5MM for Google – unless an active Google AdWords campaign is present)
• Access to traffic data – both vendors retain the right to hold and use your web analytics data, but only Yahoo gives the ability to export unaggregated data.
• Longer historical availability of reports and data. Longer historical availability of reports and data.
• Export of raw data is pretty simple in Yahoo as it comes with common format to be used with Excel.

Despite all these remarkable features, what keeps Google ahead of Yahoo is innovation. The search giant is indeed pretty clever in competing with Yahoo. Recently, Google announced API report to their analytics platform, to give a tough competition to Yahoo. But Yahoo, on the other hand, offers real time data and flexibility which are widely preferred by publishers. Yahoo offers some features like flexible dashboard, segmentation tools and campaign management features, which are essential for webmasters.

Salient features of Yahoo Web analytics

Real Time Data Collection: Yahoo offers real time data, so that you can know whats happening on your website or blog right now, including click path and time spent by a particular visitor. This helps you to understand the user’s intentions and expectations on visiting your site.

Advanced Data Visualization: Advanced data visualization allows you to add notes, which result in easier understanding once you export the report.

Advanced PPC Management: Now you can track PPC, email and other campaigns under one roof. It also allows you to import PPC campaign information from Yahoo search marketing and also from other search engines to be integrated with actions and revenue to evaluate the return of investment of your campaign, keywords and products.

Visitors Behavioral Report: This would be very useful for publishers to understand the behavior of the visitor. Behavioral reports will let you know the interest category of your visitor, based on the type of website sections they visit.

Visual Demographics Report: It lets you to better understand your customers, by aligning under age group. This report provides age group, gender of the customer from everyone of your traffic channels. Yahoo has another great feature, which allows you to picture your visitors as people than clicks.

Yahoo Web Analytics indeed has a few plum features not present in Google Analytics. Since it is not opened for public, it is tough for Yahoo to give a firm competition to Google, the market leader. As of now, it may be better than Google Analytics if opened to public. But it may not be, if Yahoo sticks to their small business and advertising publishers circle.