Want to see Gatineau ?

Microsoft’s Gatineau won’t give me much info about my adwords spend so that’s going to limit its usefulness for me.

Jack what if it did, and told you more than google about those visitors.

Daven

this is looking very nice, can’t wait to play with it myself

“Demographic analysis including age and gender”
Even though that’s a wicked cool feature, how do they get that info….unless the person who comes across the site is logged in to their msn/hotmail/live/whatever account at the time they do the search. I mean what percentage of an average site’s visitors come from MSN??

Wicked Keemo, you would be surprised !

Care to tell us how many of your visitors come from MSN Dave??

Wicked Keemo, You don’t use any MS product ??

I do. But what does that have to do with search? Alright, I know that Vista has MSN/Live as the default SE but I still manage to get the vast majority of my traffic from Google and Yahoo.
Or am I missing something here?

Keemo what he may mean is that the majority of people use at least one Microsoft service which records a persons details, hotmail, messenger, live etc. And so the age and gender in the analytics can be matched from that.

Hmmmm…does it have anything to do with microsoft passports? That would be really evil….

Dave,

Thanks for the post. There’s a little more information on Project Gatineau at my blog: http://www.liesdamnedlies.com.

Cheers,
Ian Thomas

Interesting, looking forward to having a look at it! I wonder if Google is secretly planning some new features for Google Analytics that they will release simultaneously in an attempt to steal the thunder..

I wonder if it’ll work on FireFox? [/snarkyRemark]

For me, it’s somewhat of a trust issue. I trust Google, more or less, not to be evil with my site stats – MS, not so much. I wonder how many others feel this way?

Gosh, do you think people are stupid. This reads, smell and definitly is a PR ploy. Q: you cannot do this, A: wait and see. Just creating expectation disguised as real comments.
BTW If this comment gets posted then I might be wrong (though in any case take this page with a couple grains of salt).

It has pretty charts, it discriminates based on gender and other stereotypes (I’m assuming) and of course the math is all wrong (try adding 97%+187% … it doesn’t really work).

Lastly, it seems to be dumbed down with very little in the way of visitors vs. page hits and all the other vectors. I’m glad MS isn’t really able to process vast amounts of information like this. If they were, society would be in trouble.

Way to leak information that wasn’t supposed to be out yet. Go you…

I’m not convinced. Google has had such a head start, seriously. No-one wants to trash all their historical data and start again…

And is it just me or are those 3D visualizations actually a crap way to view this? It’s linear data people…3D just makes it harder to see.

Lastly, I use GA for ecommerce/adwords correlation, so yeah. Hard to see Google saying “sweet, go ahead” for Microsoft to offer support for that in Gatineau. And again, I have over a year’s worth of history for most of my sites now (numbering in the low hundreds).

These “advanced” visualizations aren’t my thing at all. Blame me old-fashioned, but I like to see how many visitors there was in any given day without tracking the graph using my finger or any other pointing device. Fancy 3D has it’s place and so has clear illustrative 2D graphs. Reinventin’ the wheel, if I may say.

@Daniel I was at Adchamps Europe, where we had a Day with Microsoft engineers, on that day we covered IMO much bigger things that Gatineau, but we are under NDA for those, all I did was ask If the gatineau project was under NDA and it wasn’t, the same as AdExcellence was under NDA so I blogged that, there was so much cool information I just didn’t know where to start, I have other Non-NDA things i could blog about, but i worries that it would drag me into the NDA stuff so I said clear, Like I know the Date when gatineau goes live, but I think that’s covered By NDA.. lol

Added.. Microsoft won’t use me for PR anyway lol..

trust you make no evil company selling your data to whoever gives more while helping secret police to imprison goverment opponents

What’s the point of the 3D graphics? Given that there’s only two dimensions of data for each series, adding a third only makes it harder to read. Quickly now, what’s the value for Friday under the last screenshot? Well, it seems to be halfway up that gray bar in the background. Now if I follow the gray bar around to the left and note where it wraps to the front, I can guess that it’s maybe around the 65,000 mark. If this graph were in 2D (yes, I see you can toggle it) I wouldn’t need to mentally translate for the third dimension and could simply line it up and make the same guess much more directly. What if there are three series in the graph and one of them gets obscured by the other two… do I now have to attempt to discern what the value is by squinting and hoping I can see through the semi-transparent shapes of the other series? This says “Look ma, we can do 3D!” but I fail to see where it adds any value.

gatineau.adcenter.microsoft.com/Gatineau/

Why does Microsoft insist on creating something just to compete and grab some of the market share? I know it’s still just a beta but three-dimensional graphs have less meaning than simple two-dimensional ones. Look a the screenshot for male/female stats. All it reveals is that there are some vague differences. Actually determining what those differences are is impossible.

More widget-like options does not equal better software.

The biggest questions so far should be cost and USEFUL features. Google Analytics is free. If Gatineau isn’t free, why use it over Google? What does it do that Google Analytics does not?

Follow up to my previous comment:

Regarding Windows Live ID, why does Microsoft insist on it so much? Passport failed so they renamed it to something more confusing. Now they’re going to try to use data from it in their stats? Seems too fishy. They claim that no personal information will be gathered and while that may be true, it’s not accurate by any means. The stats aren’t just about gender and age. They’re about gender and age of those who have a Windows Live account. Not everyone does so it’s not a true representation of the audience. It’s a meaningless segment of it.

James (#17) makes a great point about starting all over tracking stats. Why would someone want to ditch Google Analytics, for example, and start all over with Gatineau? Unless Google and Microsoft make some deal where they can import/export data between stats packages (like that’s going to happen…), why switch? It’s bad enough that it’s not possible to import stats into Google. To start all over again is too much of a hassle.

Blake K. (#21) makes some great points about the 3D aspects. I share your sentiments wholeheartedly.

I’m not sure what all the fuss is about the “leak” of Gatineau screen shots and “MS trying to catch up” as if this is a new product. Like most things Microsoft, it is not home grown. Go to http://www.deepemtrix.com to see the LiveStats product, from which MS is getting its inspiration. We have used LiveStats for several years and it’s a good product. The 3D graphs are not as difficult to use as you might think because they are “live” graphs. As you hover over them with the mouse they report the stats for that specific data point.

Basically. as far as I can see, Gatineau is not a new product, but an old one that will have new features (like the LiveID integration)

And the gatineau name? Probably a play on the DeepMetrix location. It’s a Quebec company…

I must say that looks pretty cool , cant wait to try out this thing , but can it compete with mint ?

Is the reporting real time or delayed?

I am looking forward to any additional tool to use….this will end up just like the great PC vs. Mac debate with MicroSoft and Google though, everyone will pick a side except the few of us that will use both for what each one is good at and get the benefits from both….Why choose just one?

Ok, Like I said Dave, MSN Adcenter, adlabs and now this… watch out Google. MSN only needs the damn traffic.

Raw data about visitors and conversions is one thing but demographic data I am always suspicious of.

How accurate is the demographic data is my only question?

Gatineau is really a Microsoft buyout of DeepMetrix LiveStats. It’s been around long before Google Analytics. I wonder if they will enhance the DeepMetrix product or mess it up more… (For those interested, before DeepMetrix, it was Mediahouse Software.)

Anyone know if there’s an API for this project? Thanks..

As a Deepmetrix LiveStats user (the product Microsoft bought and based Gatineau on) I feel left out. No updates and no information at all since Microsoft came into the picture…

I hope they will continue the stand alone version. It is great, but needs some fixes/updates I believe Microsoft could do very well I they want to.

I am currently using Livestats from Deepmetrix and am very happy with this product. Some months ago MIcrosoft announced that they had taken over Deepmetrix and that the Livestats product would not be supported after January 28, 2008. When do they think they are going to deliver Gatineau???? At the moment it is all vaporware.

How exactly does it work out age, name and gender? It’d be great information, but how exactly does it get hold of the data in the first place?

I think the product is going to work great. We have used DeepMetrix for years now and it has always provided a lot of information. With Microsoft purchasing DeepMetrix they already are starting with product in my opinion that is better and much more developed than Googles Analytics. Microsoft will fine tune, add features and end up with a superior product.

[…]ok Google Analytics is pretty darn good and the interface is rocking, But Microsoft is going to give you reports and visualisations that you haven’t seen before and data about you visitors like age and gender, seriously you just can’t get that data in any other service. I’m not saying Bail on Google Analytics run them both side by side then choose[…] awesome.
But do people realize how much power they give to both google and MS, while running this software?

Whatever became of Livestats / Gatineaux? Do you think MS might resurect this project under the Bing moniker?

The stats aren’t just about gender and age. They’re about gender and age of those who have a Windows Live account. Not everyone does so it’s not a true representation of the audience. It’s a meaningless segment of it.

Want to see Gatineau ?

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