YWA Opt-out and Privacy Policy

Here at Yahoo! we take online privacy seriously, and in regards to Yahoo! Web Analytics we try to satisfy the needs of both our YWA customers and their visitors that we track. With that in mind we provide these visitors the option to opt-out of being tracked and we require all of our YWA customers to include a link to this opt-out in their website’s privacy policy.

This opt-out is not a new feature as we’ve had it since the early days of YWA in 2008 but we decided to write this refresher about the opt-out and our privacy policy requirements. We will also try to answer some of the common privacy questions we get about YWA.

What are YWA’s Privacy Requirements?

YWA’s Privacy Policy requires that all of our YWA customers inform their visitors about the tracking methodology used by Yahoo! Web Analytics and to provide their visitors with the ability to opt-out from being tracked.

You can simply include the following paragraph in your privacy policy:

Third-Party Web Beacons: We use third-party web beacons from Yahoo! to help analyze where visitors go and what they do while visiting our website. Yahoo! may also use anonymous information about your visits to this and other websites in order to improve its products and services and provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by Yahoo!, click here.

You are also required to include a link to the following page, which allows visitors to your website to opt-out from being tracked:

https://reports.web.analytics.yahoo.com/optout,OptOut.vm

How does the YWA opt-out link work?

When the opt-out link is clicked a cookie is set in the user’s browser that prevents YWA from tracking any of their further online actions.  This is a universal setting that applies to all sites that use YWA.  This will be a permanent change in the user’s browser provided that they don’t delete their cookies.

Why do we have the opt-out?

We value transparency and feel that web users are better served by having information and tools available to make an informed choice regarding their online engagement.

What happens if I don’t have a privacy policy and/or a link to the opt-out on my site?

Yahoo! reserves the right to audit the sites of our YWA customers to ensure compliance with our privacy requirements. Failure to comply with our requirements can result in your YWA account being terminated.

Once you have made updated your privacy policy, you will need to provide Yahoo! Web Analytics with the URL to your privacy policy. To do so, go to Settings – Manage Projects, and click on the Edit button next to each of your projects. On the Project Settings page, you need to click again on Edit, input the URL to your privacy policy in the text box allotted to it and click on the Update button. Please note that you need to provide links to your privacy policies for each of the projects you are currently tracking with Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Do you have any other questions on the YWA opt-out or our privacy requirements? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Social Bookmarking with Delicious and YWA

This is a guest post by Carl Rowlands, a Yahoo! Service Engineer in the Client Services team, which advises on Yahoo! Web Analytics (YWA) implementation and best practice.

For all those interested in the many web analytics resources which exist on the internet, we suggest making use of the Delicious (a Yahoo! Company) social bookmarking service. We’ve made a start and set up a specific YWA tag in Delicious here.

Of course, there are plenty of other features in Delicious that make it an ideal training and self-education tool for anyone looking to learn more about web analytics.

For example, if we look at the ywa_support_resources bookmarks, as above, we can choose the links which relate specifically to YWA, by clicking on the tag ‘ywa’. This means we can easily extract and share resources which relate specifically to YWA, and easily differentiate these from the resources relating to web analytics in general.

And then, once we’ve drilled down to ‘ywa’, we can also choose those links which provide comparisons between different tools, by clicking on ‘comparison.’

Of course, with any social networking service, the more people that use this, the better it will work. The good news is that Delicious is now accessible using any Yahoo! account.  It’s easy to log in and start adding to our collective knowledge of YWA and web analytics.

As well as this, the Delicious tag search facility provides a peer-generated selection of sites across a range of analytics-related topics. It’s well worth a look.

Track Your Twitter Branding Effectiveness In Real-Time With Yahoo! Web Analytics

Note: The following is a post by Matt Lillig, who is the Senior Analytics Lead at Yahoo!.

Promoted Tweets

With the recent launch of ‘Promoted Tweets’, advertisers such as Best Buy, Starbucks, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, and Virgin America are lining up to grow their brand awareness using one of the hottest social networks around….Twitter.

According to Twitter on its official blog, “You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand.” (see an example below with Starbucks).

(more…)

YWA Quick Guides

We’ve just released a new section to our Yahoo! Web Analytics Help Center called Quick Reference Guides. There you can find our quick guides on installation and custom fields.

Our Quick Install Guide contains some basic information for the newer Yahoo! Web Analytics user so that you can get up and running as soon as possible. Questions answered include:

• Where do I actually get my tracking code?
• Where do I put the tracking code?
• How do I check the tracking code?

You’ll also find some interesting information on how the tracking code works and what are the best steps for quickly checking how well your code is working.

Our Custom Fields Guide will give you lots of great information on YWA custom fields and how you can use them from set-up to reporting. We cover what they are, provide some use cases and illustrate the scopes and carry-over options.

If you’re using custom fields or you’ve been in a quandary about how to use them – you need to read this guide!

If you have suggestions for other Quick Reference Guides like these, please do let us know.

v.4 Tracking Code Migration Deadline is Approaching

In 2009 we moved all of our legacy IndexTools accounts to a new data center, additionally we introduced our new v.5 tracking code and updated the v.4 tracking code. At that time we announced that v.4 would remain fully supported until July 30th, 2010. Well that migration deadline is fast approaching and we would like to again remind our customers to check their site(s) to ensure that they won’t be impacted.

Please note that when v.4 support ends YWA will continue to track sites utilizing this code but going forward there will be no updates, bug fixes or technical support for that version.

You can still access the original migration guides for Partners/Consultants and end users should you need to switch and our v.5 installation guide is another invaluable resource. Also, one of our YWACN members, Sally Knows, has put together a free tool called No Tags, No Glory which can scan your site and alert you to any pages that contain legacy tracking code. You can also contact us if you have any questions or are having issues with the migration.

Please note that this will not affect any users who became customers after May 2009.

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