We are happy to announce that Project Gatineau, Microsoft’s new, free web analytics service, is ready for beta testing and the first invitations are now being sent to customers.

To manage Project Gatineau’s growth and give customers the best web analytics service possible, the beta is by invitation for US advertisers only for the moment.

All advertisers can request an invitation here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/microsoft-adcenter-gatineau

Project Gatineau’s web analytics are useful to sites of all sizes – from smaller sites that can’t afford an expensive web analytics solution to larger sites looking for a boost in their web analytics capabilities.

So, what’s the big deal?

Microsoft has been promoting the project for some time now, as noted by Tamar at 10e20 back in January, and again in March during a review of low cost analytics:

With Gatineau around the corner (and we can still anticipate its launch), there are other free analytics applications that you should consider using on your site.

David Naylor showed off some screen shots while it was still in Alpha in July that were impressive. But Search Marketing Gurus stole the show with more specifics that will be employed in the new Gatineau.

There are still some very important questions that remain:

1. How will Gatineau be able to pull website owners away from their current analytics packages?
2. What can MSN bring to the table that hasn’t been offered by other analytics services?
3. Will this be added to the Webmaster Portal that was supposed to launch into private beta last month?
   (still unconfirmed that it did launch in limited release)

MSN adCenter Labs has provided some unique tools for marketing and optimization, can this be what we should expect from Gatineau?

Have any of you signed up for the beta? If so, what are your early thoughts?

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Following on the footsteps of Google Analytics, we have another large player with what looks to be a powerful and free web analytics application. It looks like it will have a heavy focus on ecommerce and demographic segmentation which is important since the goals of these free analytics apps are to get the AdCenter and Adwords advertisers to spend more money on their ad platforms. Like Google Analytics, Gatineau can be used on it’s own without being an AdCenter advertiser.

The beta invites are supposedly going out next month, sign up here if you’d like to get in line.

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Microsoft Gatineau Plots Against Google Analytics

A beta version of Microsoft’s analytics product, dubbed ‘Gatineau’, has gained some attention as a few leaked details about it led to some online confirmation from a Microsoft staffer.

Dave Naylor plugged some screenshots from the in-alpha Gatineau on his blog. He’s projecting a positive response for Gatineau once Microsoft loosens the chains a bit:

Google Analytics is pretty darn good and the interface is rocking, But Microsoft is going to give you reports and visualisations that you haven

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-gatineau-plots-against-google-analytics-2007-07/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/free-microsoft-analytics-coming-2007-01 http://www.webpronews.com/free-microsoft-analytics-coming-2007-01#comments Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:46:23 +0000 Nathan Weinberg http://www.webpronews.com/?p=34498 Search Engine Guide writes that Microsoft has confirmed code name: "Gatineau", a free website analytics package that will roll out later this year. ]]> Search Engine Guide writes that Microsoft has confirmed code name: “Gatineau“, a free website analytics package that will roll out later this year.

Gatineau had been rumored for the last week or so, and Microsoft confirmed its existence via some team member’s blogs. They said that Gatineau will be released slowly, in order to avoid the complications that happened during the rollout of Google Analytics, which means you can probably expect an invite or delayed acceptance program.

The purpose of such a service is in order to give Microsoft access to the same website statistics their giving you for free. Such data can be wildly useful, especially if the companies using Microsoft analytics are Microsoft advertising partners. Plus, it brings some goodwill, and could be a driving force making people switch to Windows Live (assuming it isn’t an MSN product) if Gatineau’s features are better than Google’s.

The product is slated for release later this year, but Microsoft intends to gradually add users to avoid the system instability that initially plagued Google Analytics, Thomas wrote. “We hope to release this product during 2007; however, we’re extremely keen to avoid a repeat of Google’s experience with Google Analytics, so we will be ramping up our user numbers gradually to make sure everyone has a good experience from a performance perspective,” he wrote.

The Gatineau code name is because the system is built on that of Gatineau, Canada-based DeepMetrix, which Microsoft acquired last May. Check out Ian Thomas’ blog for more info, and a way to get yourself on the invite list right now.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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