Analytics Expert Blog

Yahoo! Web Analytics reached its second birthday last month, and it’s time to reflect upon and celebrate one of the most significant improvements that Yahoo! brought to the product with its purchase of IndexTools – Demographics and Interest Groups.

At the birth of Yahoo! Web Analytics in May 2008, demographic reporting consisted of divining the location of a website visitor from his IP address and inferring his spoken language from his browser preferences (fig. 1).  This information is very important in understanding where your visitors are located, whether there is a gap in your geo-targeting endeavors, whether it’s worth considering broader language support, and so on.

(fig. 1)

While these reports are interesting, they can be slightly one-dimensional in isolation, which is why Yahoo! introduced a richer layer of reporting in order to transform website visitor statistics into visiting people.

The Yahoo! network is enormous and Yahoo! Web Analytics reports capitalise on this by being able to tell the age, sex and gender of your website visitor if they are logged into this network.  This is not shown at an individual level, for obvious privacy reasons, but think of the significance to your targeting efforts if you know that the majority of your website visitors are females between the age of 25 and 34 (fig. 2)!

(fig. 2)

And the fun doesn’t end there.  Yahoo! properties span the length and breadth of the pastimes and enthusiasms of online users.  All types of people are catered for by Flickr, Yahoo! Answers , Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and so on.  Within these properties are various categories of interest – and both are reported by Yahoo! Web Analytics (fig.3 & 4).

(fig. 3)

(fig. 4)

So, now you know WHO is coming to your site, WHAT are you going to do about it?