Posts tagged ‘google’

Tracking Paid Search in Google Analytics from Microsoft and Yahoo - and other campaigns

February 22nd 2008 by Andrew Banks in Google AnalyticsNo Comments »

Just a quick post today to highlight an excellent article that has been published on the Official Google Analytics Blog.

Many of the websites I have inherited come with Google Analytics running on them and all too often these are just set up with basic stats tracking and maybe a bit of e-commerce and funnel stuff going on. Obviously AdWords campaigns are also tracked if auto tagging has been enabled in the customers AdWords account.

What many people don’t realise is the ease in which you can track Microsoft AdCenter PPC campaigns, Yahoo PPC ads and pretty much any other online marketing campaign you have running.

I won’t go into the details here as the article on the Official Google Analytics Blog covers all this. It’s definitely worth taking the time to read as being able to measure your traffic and conversion rates from each and every online source is essential if you want to make sure you are spending your online marketing budget in the right place.

Microsoft Gatineau – Is it worth using?

February 21st 2008 by Andrew Banks in Google Analytics, Microsoft Gatineau3 Comments »

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.

Microsoft to (possibly) buy Yahoo

February 1st 2008 by Andrew Banks in General, SEO / SEM2 Comments »

If reports that are coming to the surface at the moment are to be believed, Microsoft are attempting to purchase Yahoo for $46 billion.

Although this is in it’s very early stages I can’t help wondering what this could mean five years down the line for us involved in online marketing. Microsoft and Yahoo already lag far behind Google in terms of search volumes but could their combined user base help them to catchup with Google in the search market?

The reach of both of these companies is huge, with Microsoft’s dominance in desktop computing they have the potential to push their/Yahoo’s products out to the majority of computer users at will giving them every possibility of catching up with Google. Imaging your default homepage now being Yahoo, your Microsoft Passport and Yahoo accounts being merged, your pictures on your PC being synchronised with Flickr (goodbye Picasa).

One big plus I see in this is the for the pending launch of Microsoft Gatineau. The biggest feature I see within Gatineau is the ability to profile your website users by age and gender, based on information from their passport account. If the same information can be harvested from a Yahoo account then the accuracy and validity of this data is massively increased.

There are many potential benefits to come from this deal, if it happens, and it will be interesting to see how this develops.

This also seems to be backed up by a report from Reuters and the full letter to the Yahoo Board has been publiched by the Time Online