Yahoo has announced its plans to acquire the assets of IndexTools, also known as Tensa Kft., a Web analytics software company. Yahoo said it will be acquiring IndexTools’ Web analytics business and technology and its Tensa R&D Kft. subsidiary. The transaction will take place in the first half of 2008, the company said.
“Our primary attraction to IndexTools, as with other technology acquisitions, is the people who have built that technology,” explained Bassel Ojjeh, SVP of strategic data at Yahoo.
Ojjeh’s division will oversee IndexTools when it is integrated with the company. That process that does not have a published timeline, but he said that he hoped integration will take place “as quickly as possible.”
Small to midsize businesses will be the first of Yahoo’s customers to be offered the use of these enhanced tools, the company said. In the year following the acquisition, Yahoo said it plans to add more capabilities to its analytics offerings in order to help third-party developers better monitor and optimize their applications’ traffic performance.
IndexTools will extend Yahoo’s existing analytics offerings, allowing users to track metrics for online campaigns across the entire Yahoo network. “The product has an excellent reputation in the marketplace,” Ojjeh said. This acquisition further cements our position as the partner of choice for advertisers, providing them insight into the campaigns that they are running.”
Ojjeh said that it was IndexTools’ ability to capture and report user data in real time that was most compelling for Yahoo. “Closing the loop between analyzing performance, changing ad spend and analyzing the performance of the changed campaign has been talked about, but it is through the addition of real-time capabilities that advertisers will see it happen,” he said.
The IndexTools team will remain in their original headquarters in Hungary, according to Ojjeh.
This is the third major announcement Yahoo has made this week after rejecting Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid for a second time on Monday. In addition to the news about IndexTools, Yahoo released more details about AMP, its new advertising management platform. And today, the company launched video sharing on its popular photo site, Flickr.
