Dear Yahoo, Please Offer IndexTools for Free, K Thx Bye

Google’s acquisition of Urchin–and subsequent decision to offer Google Analytics for free–certainly changed the web analytics landscape. With measurement of traffic and ROI an important part of convincing advertisers to spend more of their online ad campaign on paid search ads, Google and Microsoft–with its upcoming Gatineau–understand the value of providing such tools to marketers.

Today, the light bulb came on for Yahoo.

[Yahoo] today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire substantially all of the assets of Tensa Kft., more commonly known as IndexTools, a leading provider of Web analytics software for online marketing….Upon completion of the acquisition, the addition of the IndexTools’ assets is intended to expand Yahoo!’s powerful set of services designed to maximize its clients’ online marketing efforts.

With the acquisition of the robust IndexTools web analytics suite, Yahoo’s taken the first of two very important steps.

Step One: Buy an analytics tools so you can further show advertisers the benefits of using Yahoo Search Marketing and the newly launching AMP.

Step Two: Make it available for free.

No news yet on Step Two. While Yahoo’s press release is full of language that suggests the company will remove the $50-$250 per month price tag, it doesn’t go as far as to be explicit about it. The best we get is…

“We expect that the IndexTools’ technology platform will provide our customers the opportunity to more quickly uncover and act on these insights, enhancing Yahoo!’s status as a partner of choice in online marketing and the must buy for the world’s advertisers.”

Surely that includes offering it for free, right? After all, if you’re going to keep the price tag, then what’s the point? Yahoo customers could have just paid the $50 a month directly to IndexTools–if they wanted to pay for analytics.

We’ve emailed Yahoo PR one simple question: “Will Yahoo make IndexTools available for free?”

I suspect we won’t get a simple answer, at least not right away.

Update: As expected, no simple answer from Yahoo. Company spokesperson Denis Roy tells us…

“The acquisition of IndexTools is about providing the highest amount of value to our customers and partners to support Yahoo!’s Must Buy strategy.  As such, we’re going to explore all of the different ways we can offer the functionality and benefits of the IndexTools technology into the hands of all of our customers and partners.  

Between IndexTools and Yahoo!’s own analytics tools we intend to provide a full suite of analytics to our head and tail advertisers, agencies, publishers and development partners.  However, we’re not commenting today on specific aspects of potential product strategy as it is still early in the integration process.”

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