Have you ever bailed on an online checkout because something in the user experience bugged you? Or were pleasantly surprised that the sponsored listings were more relevant than the regular results of your web search? This week, we are rolling out a new service that creates a helpful feedback loop for e-merchants, website owners, advertisers, and developers based on how well they did with you in critical moments like these.

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. They’ll get custom real-time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to amp up their visitor satisfaction.

We’re rolling the service out in phases for the remainder of 2008 and into next year. The first big deployment is Yahoo! Small Business, whose 13,000 hosted e-commerce customers can get set up just in time for the holiday shopping season at the click of a button. We have already started to roll Yahoo! Web Analytics out to advertisers who seek Yahoo!’s help to build custom micro-sites, as well as to third-party application developers who build widgets and other mini-apps for Yahoo! users via our developer network or our new Yahoo! Open Strategy tools.

Nothing is worse for site owners—and consumers—than bad marketing or a lousy user experience. Here’s an easy tool designed to combat them… and fast.

For more information, please visit http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/ and check out the FAQ.

Jitendra Kavathekar
VP, Yahoo! Web Analytics