Microsoft Gatineau – Is it worth using?
21 Feb 2008 by Andrew Banks in Google Analytics, Microsoft Gatineau
I’ve recently started trialling Microsoft’s new Google Analytics challenger, Microsoft Gatineau and thought it would be worthwhile posting a few thoughts here for the un-initiated.
For those who aren’t aware of what Microsoft Gatineau is, it is a web analytics package that Microsoft has been developing based on top of Deep Metrix, which Microsoft recently acquired.
Is most website owners now use Google Analytics as their analytics tool of choice, I really wondered what I would gain from using Microsoft Gatineau over Google Analytics.
At first glances Microsoft Gatineau offers pretty much the standard bag of data including:
- Visitor tracking
- Hits tracking
- Conversion tracking
However, the user interface is slow, clunky and not intuitive and really lags a long way behind Google Analytics. It shows pretty much the same information but Microsoft have a long long way to go before the user interface and ultimate usefulness of Gatineau comes even close to Google Analytics.
A core benefit of using Microsoft Gatineau over Google Analytics is the direct integration of paid advert reporting from ad campaigns run through the Microsoft AdCenter, in the same way that Google Adwords integrates with Google Analytics.
For those without a Microsoft AdCenter campaign then there’s nothing on the surface that would convert you over from Google Analytics.
Or is there?
One absolute gem of a feature is the ability to cross segment your visitors by:
- Gender
- Age
- Occupation
Wow! Something that was previously only possible to do with logged in and registered users can now be done with general, every day visitors to your website.
Microsoft achieves this by linking up with its Passport system and by logging certain information from a users Microsoft Passport account when they hit your website. Granted, not all users have a passport account but from the websites I have been testing on I’ve seen over 50% of visitors information can be accessed.
How accurate this data is is yet to be seen but this one feature alone will prompt me to add Microsoft Gatineau to every website I launch from now on.
For most serious web marketers Microsoft Gatineau will present them with a more detailed view of who their customers are and how best to market to them.
I certainly won’t be dropping Google Analytics any time soon as Microsoft have some serious catching up to do in the analytics space but I will be running both Google Analytics and Microsoft Gatineau side by side from here on in.
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Tags: Analytics, gatineau, google, microsoft
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Google Analytics, Microsoft Gatineau. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
On February 21st 2008 at 11:14 pm, Andrew Banks said :
I would love to Gab but unfortunately none of the sites I have Gatineau installed on actually track the gender of the user, their occupation or (reliably) their date of birth!
The biggest site I have this on has 13,000 users and the only way to determine their gender would be to go through their names, one by one, and allocate a gender to them!
I think my client should be tracking this anyway due to the nature of the site so I’ll try and get gender added into the user profile.
I have a few new sites going live shortly so will track this data and run a comparison where possible.
On February 22nd 2008 at 5:45 pm, adCenterEU said :
Great feedback Andrew, and you’re right the demographics is a major differentiator. Do be aware Gatineau is very much still in Beta and you’ll see many more feature additions and improvements over the coming months.
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On February 21st 2008 at 9:28 pm, Gab Goldenberg said :
If you could compare the demographic data you’re sure of from logged in users with what Gatineau provides to give an indication of how accurate Gatineau is, then that would be awesome.