First look into and review of Microsoft’s Gatineau web analytics tool

Posted on October 31, 2007 at 9:58 am

If you haven’t heard, Microsoft has released their web analytics tool called Gatineau into private beta testing. I signed up for this and was lucky enough to receive an invitation to try out the new Google Analytics competitor! I’ve only been using it for a day, so my review of Gatineau will not be complete, but I’ll try to give the best opinion with the data that I have. Also, I’ll try and compare and contrast Google Analytics and Microsoft Gatineau as we go along.

First off, the tracking code is very similar to Google Analytics, but gives you the option of using regular HTTP code or secure HTTPS code on your site. Once installed, you’ll see a new tab in Microsoft adCenter called Analytics. Under that you’ll see a button for Profiles, which are the different websites or blogs that you want to track.

You can also setup different users for viewing reports, etc. That’s pretty much the same as with Google Analytics. Now you can begin by viewing the reports for each profile. For me I only have one, which is this blog. Here’s how the default page looks like when you view the report:

Microsoft has the pretty looking 3D charts going on with Gatineau, but it doesn’t really add any value if you ask me, except for making it look fancier. It gives you basic information such as the number of visits, page views, entry pages, exit pages, bounces, and bounce rate. I’m not really sure what Visits (%) is supposed to be.

In order to drill down to see which pages got the most traffic and to use check out the segmentation for the traffic, you have to click on the domain name and you’ll get a little popup menu as shown below:

Clicking on View Contents of Group will give you a breakdown of traffic and other stats for each category or page that was visited. The cool thing that I liked about the way Gatineau displays the data is that it sorts it by categories. I’m not sure if this is because I’m using Wordpress and it figured it out on it’s own, but it actually picked up my blog categories and broke down the visits that way:

I actually found this to be pretty cool because it’s good to see which categories in my blog are the most popular. At this point, I do not believe Google Analytics breaks down the visits by blog category. You can then select a category and it’ll break it down by page.

Also, the other report that Microsoft has been selling as a major plus for Gatineau is the fact that it can break down traffic by segments, such as Age, Gender, Occupation, and Geographical Location. Here’s a report for Online-Tech-Tips of visitors broken down by gender:

Most of the visitors could not be identified as they were not signed up with Windows Live, etc, but about 25% were identified and of those, 17% were male and about 8% were female. Pretty good information for anyone who wants see what kind of people are interacting with their site. The report by occupation was a little more revealing:

I was surprised to see that I had so many student visitors to my site! Everything else makes sense: computer related, engineering, etc. Of course, most of the visitors could not be identified and therefore doesn’t make the reports that useful. I’m hoping that later on it can capture data on more visitors.

You can also see your inbound referrals and outbound referrals, once you set the latter one up. Inbound referrals are broken down into Search (from the search engines), Not Referred (which is direct) and Natural (which is from other web sites like Digg, etc).

That’s pretty much the extent of the reports currently in Microsoft Gatineau. You can also setup goals and funnels like in Google Analytics, so there’s no difference there. Also, you can check out visitor information such as browsers, languages, operating systems, and screen resolution, which is in both analytic tools.

Overall, I think Gatineau is about 2.5 stars out of 5. The interface was a little slow and I didn’t think it was very well organized. I don’t like the fact that in order to drill down you have to click on the domain name and choose from the popup menu. I was expecting more out of the product, but I guess it’s still in beta and hopefully gets more features.

If you’re using Google Analytics right now, I don’t think the reports from Gatineau will add much value. I really did like the category breakdown though that Gatineau picked up for my Wordpress blog.

Anyone else use Gatineau yet? What are your thoughts? Post a comment!

[tags]microsoft gatineau, gatineau analytics, web analytics, website analytics tools, gatineau[/tags]

» Filed Under Software Reviews

Comments

11 Responses to “First look into and review of Microsoft’s Gatineau web analytics tool”

The How-To Geek said on : October 31st, 2007 at 12:59 pm

Very nice writeup… I’ve been wondering how well their product works, but didn’t want to try it for fear it would slow down my site.

It’s very interesting that they include demographic information… I’m wondering where they get that info from.

akishore said on : October 31st, 2007 at 2:55 pm

Thanks Geek! It hasn’t slowed my site down too much that would be noticeable, but it’s still an extra HTTP request, so I may remove it later on, not sure yet.

Nirmal said on : October 31st, 2007 at 9:45 pm

Great review! I too had signed up for beta, but didnt get the invite.

Venkat said on : November 1st, 2007 at 3:18 am

The categories breakdown really impressed me, will definitely be good competition for Google.

akishore said on : November 1st, 2007 at 8:15 am

Yeah, there are some cool features about Gatineau. I hope they improve it by the time it comes out of beta.

Dj Flush said on : November 2nd, 2007 at 5:25 am

Google Analytics is going down now a days

No wonder Microsoft planned a nice time to launch the beta

and in the end I must say that a great review by you Kishore

Dean Collins said on : November 29th, 2007 at 8:16 am

Yes but will it do mobile browsers Guess not…..

For those of you building web apps for mobile phones check out http://www.amethon.com or more specifically http://www.amethon.com/Content.....lytics.seo it’s an analytics asp just for tracking mobile phone browsers.

lol – this message brought to you by people working on ‘new’ products rather than copying google

Cheers,
Dean.Collins@amethon.com

Justo said on : January 16th, 2008 at 7:55 am

Nice review, you could read our own review at

http://www.analytics20.org/too.....irst-part/

Regards

MS ACA Forums said on : February 2nd, 2009 at 8:17 pm

Do you know how they track outbound referals via their autotracking code?

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