Free Microsoft Web Analytics Solution Debuts into Beta

Project codenamed Gatineau is a new web analytics solution from Microsoft. The Redmond company has moved the project announced as early as January 2007 into the first beta stage and is now sending out testing invitations. Gatineau comes to fill a gap in Microsoft's suite of tools. Built under adCenter, Microsoft's pay-per-click advertising campaign platform, the Gatineau web analytics product is positioned as an alternative to Google Analytics offered by the Mountain View search giant. And in this context, there is somewhat of a discrepancy between the two rival solutions. Although both are offered as free, only Google Analytics actually fits this description. Users that want to access Gatineau will first have to cough up $5 for an adCenter account. Ian Thomas from the Microsoft's Digital Advertising Solutions group, stated that the situation was "regrettable" and "temporary", and that in the future the requirement will be removed entirely.

"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. 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. With the Gatineau beta, you can learn more about where your visitors come from and easily measure your marketing campaigns across any medium and from any traffic source. Features include: click and visitor tracking reports; marketing campaign reporting and conversion tracking and unique demographic and geographic information from your site visitors," explained Ian Thomas & Justin Carder - Microsoft Project Gatineau .

But of course that these are not the sole features of Gatineau. Microsoft's sort of free web analytics solution also brings to the table client system reports, goal analysis, ROI reports, inbound referrals, funnel report, custom taxonomies and outbound link tracking. Just follow this link in order to sign up for a beta. The testing program of Gatineau Beta 1 is limited only to US advertisers via an adCenter account for now. "Beta 1 provides automatic outbound link tracking. All you have to do to enable it is set a variable when you implement your tracking script, and all outbound links will be tracked - including downloads of things like PDFs. This is key functionality for folks who use server log-based reporting tools to track this aspect of site usage, as tag-based web analytics tools have historically not been great at tracking downloads," Thomas added.