Yahoo’s slow rollout of Yahoo Web Analytics continues with news today that its now available for free to certain Yahoo search and display advertisers.

Here’s how Yahoo explains some of the benefits of its analytics tool in today’s announcement:

“Yahoo! Web Analytics offers user insight that you’re not likely to find in other free analytics tools, including demographic and behavioral insight on your website visitors, near-real-time reporting, and visibility into as many as 50 different types of actions that take place on your site.”

It’s available to any Yahoo advertiser that works with an account manager, and interested advertisers can contact their account manager to start using Yahoo Web Analytics.

Yahoo got into the web analytics business when it acquired IndexTools software a year ago. Then, in October, Yahoo announced that the new Yahoo Web Analytics service would be rolled out slowly to Yahoo’s hosted e-commerce customers.

Yahoo has announced that they’ll begin to roll out Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) on a limited basis beginning this week. According to Jitendra Kavathekar, Yahoo’s Web Analytics VP, the service has already been made available to select Yahoo advertisers and third-party application developers.

The next “big deployment,” Kavathekar says, will be for Yahoo’s 13,000 e-commerce customers hosting under the Yahoo Small Business service. Beyond that, Yahoo Web Analytics will continue to roll out for the rest of this year and into 2009. Yahoo’s analytics service is a result of the company’s purchase of IndexTools earlier this year. Shortly after the purchase, Yahoo’s Dennis Mortensen announced the company’s plans to make Yahoo Web Analytics free.

In its FAQ about the new analytics service, Yahoo suggests three reasons why its product is better than the competition:

1. Real-time Data: “While some analytics products provide data 24-48 hours after collection, Yahoo! Web Analytics reflects data within minutes of collection.”
2. Raw Data: “While some products store aggregated data, which restricts the usefulness of the data to pre-created or canned reports, Yahoo! Web Analytics stores data in non-aggregated raw form.”
3. Ease-of-Use and Flexibility

Yahoo offers a sign-up form for future updates on the Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) home page.

Update: Yahoo’s Dennis Mortensen explains more and shares screenshots in a new post on VisualRevenue.