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Advertising - Thursday, April 10, 2008

Yahoo! Buys Ad Analytics Firm Indextools

Yahoo! has paid an undisclosed amount for online ad analytic firm IndexTools. Founded in 2000 in Frankfort, Germany, IndexTools' competes with bigs like Webtrends, Visual Sciences, Omniture and Coremetrics. To some extent it also competes at the low end with Google Analytics and Microsoft adCenter Analytics.

IndexTools track consumer clicks when a visitor loads a Web page that contains IndexTools' tracking script. The script gathers data about the Web page and visitor and forwards the information to a data center, which processes and archives the data.

IndexTools charges anywhere from $50 to $250 per month depending on the size of your business. Yahoo! boasts that it will put the offering in front of its 150K advertiser users. This is much less than its other enterprise competitors. IndexTools says that "We are probably one forth of the price of Omniture, one third of the price of Coremetrix, and one half of the price of WebTrends."

One of the most interesting aspects of the deal is that IndexTools tracks data across Google, Yahoo and MSFT Adcenter. And you can bet most of the data is about Google. Also, Yahoo has close ties with a lot of the analytics companies like Omniture. This is sure to put a frost those. That said, we have to hand it to the Yahoo! folks for making strong strategic moves at a time of turmoil.

Interview With Indextool's COO

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