Microsoft Gatineau Unleashed

July 26, 2007

Last week David Naylor leaked some screen shots of Gatineau, the adCenter Web analytics tool which is said to be a project in competition to Google Analytics. As the result, it got Ian Thomas, who works in Microsoft’s Digital Advertising Solutions Group and is in charge of bringing Gatineau to speak out (unofficially).

The much noted feature in Gatineau is this nice breakout of Web site visitors by gender and the promise of a similar breakout by age, which is not provided by Google. On the questions being shooted in the comments section as to how this demographic data was obtained, this is what Thomas has to say:

“Beta 1 will include the ability to segment data by both age and gender buckets, so you can get more of an idea of what kind of visitors you have. Questions are already being asked on Dave’s blog about where we get this data from; the answer is that we do get this information from users’ Live ID (formerly known as Microsoft Passport) profiles, but I would stress that we get this information anonymously, and there is no use of PII (Personally Identifiable Information, such as name or e-mail address) in the product.”

But why are they trying to use data from it in their stats? That too the stats of the gender and age of those who have a Windows Live account? Claiming that no personal information will be gathered something not making some sense to me at least for now.

Looking forward for the official release, this is said to happen this summer which is not too far. And also they are providing the Beta Invites.

“Beta 1 of Gatineau will likely hit the web later this summer. If you’d like to participate in the beta, please send us an e-mail, but please note that this will be a limited beta and so you may have to wait to be admitted. I’m not going to make any promises around how long that wait might be. If you’ve already e-mailed us, no need to do so again - we know who you are.”

After which we can explore its features. If not comparing it with the established Google Analytics, would like to see how useful is it and what are value added. However, there is one more question, apart from the usefulness of the product what would be the cost? And comparison would definitely arise when the pricing will be announced. When Google provides Analytics for FREE, would this be worth paying?

In January Thomas said that the Gatineau project is based on technology Microsoft acquired from DeepMetrix Corp. in 2006 and the target audience for the project is similar to the target audience for Google Analytics.

“I can’t be very specific at all about the functionality we hope to deliver, but I can say that the target audience for this project is broadly similar to the target audience for Google Analytics - though it’s emphatically not our intention simply to replicate the functionality within that product.”

Because of the screen shot leak, this has been a hot issue. Else it was not a secret anyways.

Officially, you will find it here: http://gatineau.adcenter.microsoft.com/Gatineau/