...part of convincing advertisers to spend more of their online ad campaign on paid search ads, Google and Microsoft"with its upcoming Gatineau"understand the value of providing such tools to marketers.

Today, the light bulb came on for Yahoo.

-Yahoo- today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire substantially all of the assets of Tensa Kft., more commonly known as IndexTools, a leading provider of Web analytics software for online marketing.Upon completion of the acquisition, the addition of the IndexTools assets is intended to expand Yahoo!s powerful set of services designed to maximize its clients online marketing efforts.

With the acquisition of the robust IndexTools web analytics suite, Yahoos taken the first of two very important steps.

Step One: Buy an analytics tools so you can further show advertisers the benefits of using Yahoo Search Marketing and the newly launching AMP.

Step Two: Make it available for free.

No news yet on Step Two. While Yahoos press release is full of language that suggests the company will remove the $50-$250 per month price tag, it doesnt go as far as to be explicit about it. The best we get is

We expect that the IndexTools technology platform will provide our customers the opportunity to more quickly uncover and act on these insights, enhancing Yahoo!s status as a partner of choice in online marketing and the must buy for the worlds advertisers.

Surely that includes offering it for free, right? After all, if youre going to keep the price tag, then whats the point? Yahoo customers could have just paid the $50 a month directly to IndexTools"if they wanted to pay for analytics.

Weve emailed Yahoo PR one simple question: Will Yahoo make IndexTools available for free?

I suspect we wont get a simple answer, at least not right away.

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