Yahoo Provides an Alternative to Google Analytics

Although it is still in beta and not available to the general public, Yahoo! will be rolling out its own web analytics service in the near future. The service addresses some perceived shortcomings of Google's Analytics package. First, Yahoo! will provide data in near-real time, which can be a boon for stats junkies and, more practically, for monitoring campaign, outreach traffic closely. For developers, they promise to offer an API for retrieving data. The latter will be very useful, particularly for creating custom dashboards and reports that compare traffic across multiple web properties.

Yahoo Web Analytics to finally give Google some competition

In addition to faster data, Yahoo will also provide all analytics data in raw form, instead of a periodic aggregation of things like total visitors to a page. This access to data becomes quite significant with Yahoo's promise of a forthcoming API, another feature that Google Analytics doesn't match—at least not yet.

I'd written earlier about other tools for measuring your website.