In October, Yahoo unveiled Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA), an alternative to Google's popular Analytics service. The service allows Web sites to track metrics on consumer behavior.

According to Dennis Mortensen, director of data insights at Yahoo, a key benefit of the service is real-time reports. "If someone visits at 2:16, at 2:17 you can see what he or she did on your Web site," he said.

Mortensen said conversion rates are an important benefit for store owners using the service. "If you convert 2 percent, what happened to those 98 percent that didn't convert?" he asked. "And that's information they haven't had access to before unless they set up something themselves."

Yahoo hopes to have 13,000 store owners using the service by the end of the year, Mortensen said. Meanwhile, Ecommerce-Guide.com spoke to a few small Yahoo stores already using the service to find out what they think about YWA.

Bob Shirilla uses YWA as marketing director for two Yahoo stores. Keepsakes-etc. offers an assortment of throws and wall tapestries, while Simply-bags sells personalized tote bags. Shirilla said, "Yahoo Web Analytics is an extremely powerful analysis tool that we use to manage many aspects of our online business."

Kevin Watts, director of e-commerce at Organize.com, a site that offers 13,000 products for all purposes — from tie holders to towels — said the marketing tools on the service have been particularly useful. "Using Yahoo Analytics is a new way to approach our business and help our customers find exactly what they want," he said.

Rob Snell, is the author of Starting a Yahoo Business for Dummies and a managing partner of Snell Brothers, which provides consulting for Yahoo store owners on how to improve their search marketing. He also runs the dog-supply store GundogSupply.com. He says: "We're using Analytics to improve our online store by using the funnel report to decrease the number of dropped carts, reducing bounce rates on entry pages, seeing where customers drop off the site, and segmenting different buckets of folks to see how different groups use different parts of the Web site."

What Works

Store owners said they made good use of the last-visitor info Yahoo provides. Watts said he likes to know which search engines customers used to get to Organize.com. "This tool is great for analyzing and solving tactical issues immediately," agreed Shirilla. " I can watch the path of a client from search engine, landing page, product page, and hopefully a successful checkout."

Another advantage of using Analytics for the store owners is the synergy of having a store on Yahoo and using the company's Analytics service. According to Watts, this makes the data more accurate. "The data is more accurate because it's bundled into the same package used for the store," he explained.

"We've been satisfied with Yahoo Store," Shirilla added. "And I like the way they have integrated the Web Analytics package. It's seamless, and we get to look at real-time data." As far as features that work well, Snell said he tracks "keyword nuggets of gold" by using the Conversion by Search Phrase feature.

Snell said that though the amount of data in YWA can be overwhelming, the tool is easy to use. "Once you figure out what works for you, and start comparing data from month to month to see where you're improving or not, it's easy to (work with) a tool that helps you make more money on your store."

Snell also likes the Yahoo service's ability to figure out and filter visitor IP addresses. "Just the other day I ran a custom report for number of visits and added Filtering by City/State and found 600-plus visits from a very small town, which happens to be the home of a competitor," he recalled. "Filtering by that IP address, I was able to see 130 pay-per-clicks over the past year on the same search term, going to the same landing page."

According to Snell, the troubleshooting features in YWA are beneficial to online store owners. He said one retailer was able to use the service to see how customers were stopping short from purchasing after a change in the checkout routine. When the process was reverted, customers started buying again. "The ability to troubleshoot is worth a lot to a retailer, in this case hundreds or thousands of dollars in sales," he explained.

Snell also likes the customizable dashboard. "Currently I start each morning by looking at the dashboard that we have modified for each site," Shirilla said. "In addition, we look at reports when doing keyword research, landing-page analysis, and product evaluation."

However, Snell said, the default settings for the dashboard are sufficient. "A retailer doesn't have to change a thing," he said. "With one click they can see visitors, revenue, page views, conversion rate, best internal search terms, revenue pages with the highest bounce rates, as well as segmented traffic data, like sales from organic traffic versus paid search versus other campaigns."

What Doesn't Work

According to Snell, YWA can be a little slow at times, but adds, "Maybe that's because I like to look at 100 lines in my reports at a time."

Watts would like to see a site overlay feature added to the service. He describes them as "hot and cold spots" that determine where people are clicking. He would also like to see a feature to track how one promotion is doing better than others. He'd then be able to improve the effectiveness of campaigns.

"With Yahoo Analytics you have to tag all of your paid search landing page URLs to get campaigns to track accurately," Snell explained. If you're only buying 100 terms this isn't that big of a deal, but if you're buying 10,000-plus keywords like I am, going back and tagging old campaigns can be a real bear."

Google or Yahoo?

Snell said he still finds both Google and Yahoo useful for analytics information. "The main reason I still run Google Analytics is to reconcile Google AdWords traffic between Google Analytics and Yahoo Analytics," he said.

"Google Analytics also makes it almost impossible to reconcile conversion data on orders with actual order numbers," Snell said. "With Yahoo Analytics, you can actually tie converting keywords to a specific order number."