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!

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).

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Demographic Reporting – The Yahoo! Effect

Yahoo! Web Analytics reached its second birthday last month, and it’s time to reflect upon and celebrate one of the most significant improvements that Yahoo! brought to the product with its purchase of IndexTools – Demographics and Interest Groups.

At the birth of Yahoo! Web Analytics in May 2008, demographic reporting consisted of divining the location of a website visitor from his IP address and inferring his spoken language from his browser preferences (fig. 1). This information is very important in understanding where your visitors are located, whether there is a gap in your geo-targeting endeavors, whether it’s worth considering broader language support, and so on.
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Online Video Analytics – Tracking Embedded YouTube Videos

In part I we described some of the metrics and KPIs that may be useful to content providers who wish to analyze end-user engagement with their online videos. Now we would like to show a real world example of how to use YWA to capture audience behavior while using the internet’s most popular video platform: YouTube.

Many companies now embed YouTube marketing videos directly into their website. Hosting these videos through YouTube reduces bandwidth costs and takes the headache out of setting up a hosted video platform. Companies looking to dive deeper into the performance of these embedded videos can use YWA to analyze the video metrics of value to them. For our example we are going to measure positive and negative consumption actions determined by the viewers interaction with the slider bar.

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YWA Case Study – First Choice Ski

First Choice Ski, part of the TUI Travel group, has just produced a case study of their web analytics efforts in conjunction with Yahoo! Web Analytics. You can click here to download the PDF version, but here are the highlights from Simon Rigglesworth and Penelope Bellegarde:

“We can honestly say that the quality and features in YWA easily equal, and in some areas are a lot better than paid-for packages.”

“The homepage experienced an 18% decrease in bounce rate.”

“The number of sales driven by the homepage increased 266%.”

“We think that Yahoo! Web Analytics really puts other vendors to shame.”

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