Yahoo Beats Microsoft to the Punch

Today Yahoo announced that it was releasing a free web analytics tool. Here's the skinny:

"Born out of our acquisition of IndexTools in May, Yahoo! Web Analytics (beta) provides powerful data and insights reporting that help website owners evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs."

While Yahoo's a bit late to the game here -- Google Analytics has been freely available for quite some time -- it was able to trump Microsoft in this department.

Microsoft has been rumored to have a web anlytics tool in development but, as far as I know, nothing has been released. This seems like a huge miss on their part. Microsoft has many products for businesses and a web analytics tool would be a great add on. It could also help drive usage of adCenter and Atlas if there was seamless integration.

As I mentioned in a recent Search Insider column, making Atlas free and building in web analytics would give it a huge USP over Google and Yahoo.

Only time will tell how the folks in Redmond respond but kudos to Yahoo for not rolling over (despite its share price dipping below $14 -- man, those guys have to be kicking themselves for not taking Microsoft's $33 when it was on the table) and continuing to innovate.