It’s good to be Gatineau

November 30th, 2007 by Jim Cain

I don’t think that we have been alone in following the Microsoft Gatineau project. There have been many ripples in the analytics pond recently, and new ventures out of Redmond tend to be less ripple, more wave ………..Well, except maybe for the Zune.

News/articles/blog posts abound about Gatineau, as Microsoft has now made it available as an open beta for AdCenter users. I see two themes in what I am reading, one boring and one fascinating:

BORING

Microsoft enters into the analytics space, and now poses direct competition to Google. http://mashable.com/2007/07/24/microsoft-analytics/

FASCINATING

Microsoft has added a nice piece of free analytics software into AdCentre, which includes demographic profiling technology that is not available in any other product, free or otherwise. http://salishsea.typepad.com/micromarketing/2007/11/gatineau-a-thre.html

The demographic profiling, which includes age, gender, geographic location and job title, only represents roughly 20% of web surfers. But for commerce businesses, especially those with a very defined niche, results can now be generated on things like “conversion rate of 15-25 year old males”, and “systems engineers in California”. Pretty exciting from the perspective of this conversion optimization specialist.

With that in mind, If I was sitting in a nice office at Omniture HQ right now, I might be worried about how disruptive this is going to be to my business. Because if Microsoft decides that Gatineau is going to be the best analytics tool on the market, and not a sales tool for MSN Keywords…..

Now this may or may not be the case, but I don’t know if I would take the ‘build awareness for the category’ approach that Mark Wachen http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623724 took when Google dropped into the his pond. We are all well aware of analytics, thanks.

Microsoft just built something that is in all likelihood well outside the realm of possibility for everyone else in the pond. Ripple or wave?

Posted in Personalization, Web Analytics |

2 Responses

Charles Thrasher Says:

December 1st, 2007 at 5:42 pm

Good post and a good point. The stuff about Microsoft competing with Google, or even Microsoft copying Google, with their web analytics solution is pretty short-sighted and, frankly, boring. The ability to segment your traffic with increasing granularity based on demographics - that’s exciting. The whole point of web analytics is to better understand your visitors’ goals and behaviors - their intent - to understand what they want and ultimately increase your conversions.

I found it interesting that the Web Analytics Report published by CMS Watch indicated the three most disruptive recent events in the web analytics industry were changes in WebTrends’ senior management, Omniture’s purchasee of Visual Sciences, and the Gatineau beta.

David Jaeger - Los Angeles Internet Marketing Says:

December 7th, 2007 at 12:38 am

Very good point. I am realizing more and more that Microsoft isn’t trying just to survive - they are trying to thrive.

I hate when people think that “Google is IT”. The only big thing that Google has going for it is search. They are struggling to find the next frontier. They are different than most companies in that they actually take a significant amount of their profit and reinvest.

But microsoft is doing the same thing. Their biggest win was the OS platform. They are now struggling. Linux is becoming marginally more popular, Apple is becoming alot more popular, and their profit from that market is somewhat stagnant (if not good). They’ve been in the software, gaming, and mobile markets for years… but they are trying to be innovative in new fields as well.

Their search tool in adlabs are also powerful… unfortunately, their search volume is too low to make their research valuable… but they are definitely playing a hard game.

The internet darlings I see hit are Yahoo - with the acquisition of extremely powerful properties, but a problem integrating, and ebay - with a flattening revenue curve from ebay, and their paypal acquisition… Yes, they’ve done a number of acquisitions, but they haven’t added to the platform as a whole, and they don’t have a new place to go…