Lies, Damned Lies...

What will Google do next with Google Analytics?

So I'm a little late with my obligatory post-E-metrics blog post; my excuse is that I flew straight from San Francisco to Mexico for a vacation, and have just made it back.

A fixed presence at E-metrics summits these days is our good friend, Google - in fact, this year, both Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer were sponsoring the show (possibly a somewhat inefficient use of marketing dollars, but there you go). In terms of sheer numbers of customers, Google Analytics is the 500 lb gorilla of web analytics, as anyone reading this blog will doubtless know. But where next for the two and a half-year-old wunderkind of web analytics?

One of my favorite things to do at E-metrics is to catch up with friends from the industry, and Google evangelist Avinash Kaushik and I had a very pleasant coffee where we discussed just this topic. Just to be clear, Avinash didn't reveal anything about Google's future plans for GA, but it became clear to me (from that discussion and others) that Google is scratching its head a little about how (or whether) to provide GA to enterprise clients (i.e. big companies). A lot of people are expecting it to, but for all GA's success, it remains a relatively simple analytics package, incapable of the detailed reports that you can pull with Omniture or even Webtrends. And it doesn't really seem to be in Google's DNA to provide a very feature-rich application stack like these other companies provide. In many ways they're the Microsoft Office to Google's Docs & Spreadsheets. So how to square the circle?

Whilst I was sunning myself in Mexico, I had a chance to reflect on how Google could address this challenge and here are my thoughts. As you know, I like to make predictions, just for the fun of sparking a bit of debate, so feel free to use the comments box to let me know precisely what banned substance it is that I'm smoking.

 

Prediction 1: Google will release a comprehensive mid-tier API for GA

I'm hardly going out on a limb with this prediction - it's been something that Google-watchers have been crying out for for some time (and some people have taken unilateral action to fix). But most talk about APIs has been to provide a programmatic way of pulling existing GA reports - i.e. a "front-end" API. What I'm talking about here (hence the use of the term "mid-tier") is an API into GA's data store that allows pretty much any data set to be extracted to a third-party system and then processed into a report.

Google would have to be very careful not to overwhelm their systems by providing such an API, of course; it would be all too easy to write a call which asked for all the data for a very busy site; but those eventualities could be predicted and prevented fairly easily. Note that I'm also not saying that Google will provide this API for free; there's no reason that it might not choose to charge for access to such a comprehensive data service.

You might be thinking, why would Google release an Analytics API at all? After all, isn't the point of GA to encourage people to use Google's tools to optimize their campaigns, and therefore spend more money with Google? Well, only partially. The main benefit to Google in the deployment of GA is the huge amount of data that it gives them access to. In an API scenario, Google would still control instrumentation of the site and collection of the data, and would therefore still accrue the same benefits from it as they do currently.

Prediction 1a: Related Google products will use the Google Behavior Data API

I've decided to give the new API a name - the Google Behavior Data API - to distinguish it from Google Analytics itself.

If they don't already, Google's various behavior data-consuming products (principally, Analytics and Website Optimizer) will use the same API for data access. You probably won't see any visible change in the products as a result of this. This might already have happened behind the scenes.

Prediction 1b: The Google data collection .js tag will become a "universal" tag

If Google opens up the mid-tier of their system, they'll also (eventually) need to open up the data collection part, making it possible to collect any custom variable or event you want, and subsequently being able to access this through the API. This will require new functionality in the JavaScript tag to support customizable data collection. The importance of this ability will become clear in predictions 2 and 3, below.

 

Prediction 2: The Google Behavior Data API will create a new industry of "third-party" web analytics tools

I've railed before against new entrants to the web analytics business, asking what value they can possibly add at this stage in the game. But one of the reasons I've been so skeptical in the past is that most of these folks building these kinds of new tools just don't appreciate how much effort has to go into collecting and storing the data in a format that makes it easy to deliver reports, and easy to expand functionality in the future.

A mid-tier Data API would mean that such companies could rely on Google for all the basic data collection, primary processing and warehousing, and just focus on developing interesting new reports. As long as the underlying platform is flexible, this frees up these companies to innovate at the front-end without having to worry about the back-end.

The upshot of this is that you may see web analytics functionality popping up in all sorts of places that it might not otherwise, especially in the SMB market, such as CMS/blog tools, e-commerce systems, sales automation systems and the like. Some of these systems already provide integration with Google Checkout, for example, so using Google's Data API for reporting & analytics would be a logical next step.

 

Prediction 3: Eventually, even the big guys will use the Behavior Data API

This is the big one, of course, and the most contentious. Why would a company like Omniture or Webtrends, or CoreMetrics hand over data collection to Google? Omniture, for example, has put a lot of effort behind its Universal Tag architecture, and data is as useful to them (or will be, ultimately) as it is to Google.

One chief reason is switching costs. If an Enterprise web analytics vendor wants to convert a GA customer onto their platform, then offering a "no reinstrumentation" proposition is going to be attractive. It is true that the different beacon code provided by different vendors capture different (unique) things, but there would be value in being able to say to a customer "just give us your API key and we'll do the rest", even if it did mean offering a reduced set of reports (although a universal tag with custom variables would offset this issue).

Another reason, however, is cost. It costs web analytics vendors a lot of money to host the servers for data capture and initial processing, and is one of the things that contributes to the rose-tinged bottom line of these companies. It costs Google money too, of course, but Google can probably provision servers more cheaply than anyone else on the planet (except, perhaps, our good selves), and is able to leverage the benefit of having access to the data to offset the cost.

This eventuality also neatly solves the problem of "GA in the enterprise". With the API in place, Google is free to reach agreements with the bigger web analytics vendors that preserves those vendors' positions with their customers whilst allowing GA to get in and get access to the data. "Maverick" implementation of GA by outlying departments of big companies is an increasing problem faced by the major Enterprise vendors. Being able to consume this data in their own tools would decrease the vendors' need to charge for every last byte of data they're collecting, and would enable them to say "Sure! Instrument with GA, and you'll see the aggregate numbers in our tool, too".

 

So, those are my predictions. Feel free to add yours below.

Way to go, Dennis: Yahoo! acquires IndexTools

Well, it's turning out to be quite the week for Web Analytics industry news. First we had Coremetrics's $60m cash injection; now we have the news that Yahoo! has agreed to buy IndexTools. Let me start out by sending my congratulations to Dennis Mortensen and the team at IndexTools, who have come from nowhere to take a seat at the big boys' table. As I've previously blogged, I have a soft spot for IndexTools because their development mirrors that of my previous company, WebAbacus - except that IndexTools's payout has been somewhat higher :-)

As to the implications of this deal: Firstly, I believe this is another significant step along the path to the future that I mapped out in my recent post on The Future Of Web Analytics, Demystified - that web analytics will continue to be absorbed into other, broader businesses, eventually disappearing as a line of revenue in its own right. In his post today about the deal, Eric Peterson predicts that Yahoo! will continue to charge for IndexTools, at least for the time being; but there is a strong chance that Yahoo! will make at least a part of the portfolio (the E-business edition) free in due course - perhaps charting a similar path to the one that Google took.

My money is that IndexTools will eventually be, effectively, free, because that's essentially Yahoo!'s business model (and ours, in our Online Services business). Yahoo! does not have a history of providing Enterprise software, and I would bet my bottom dollar that Yahoo!'s valuation models for ClickTools were not based upon their current lines of revenue. Even if Yahoo! continues to charge for ClickTools, the majority of the upside for the company is in the impact that ClickTools usage will have on its sales of advertising inventory, especially search.

That means that in, say, 2 years' time, when the synergy effects are starting kick in, it will make little difference to Yahoo's numbers on this deal whether they charge for ClickTools or not. So why not make it free, or at least hold the price right down to hurt folks like Omniture and Coremetrics?

As for the potential impact of a potential Microsoft-Yahoo! union on this deal, well, of course, I can't make any comment about that. But that's not to say that my little head's not buzzing with thoughts about it...

Just what the world needs: another web analytics tool

I'm amazed and kind of impressed that there are still people out there who want to get into the web analytics business. After all, it's not like there aren't plenty of tools to choose from. And the challenges of making money from web analytics are well documented (by me, anyway). So I applaud Elie El Khoury and his team at Fusion Media Labs for their chutzpha in launching Woopra (if that's not a naming decision driven by .com domain availability, I'll eat my hat) at this relatively late stage in the game.

Before I go on, yes, I know we're in the middle of launching our own, not-exactly-first-to-market web analytics service, but as I've explained elsewhere, if you want to be in the web analytics business today, you really need to be in some other related businesses as well to pay the bills, and to provide a compelling reason to use your app. So I shall be interested to see how Woopra is monetized (there's no mention of pricing on the site as yet).

Elie's background is in graphic design, which can be seen in the very shiny (and very Visual Sciences-esque) UI design. But what else is there to Woopra? The (hilarious) demo video (click the link before it's replaced with something sensible) doesn't give much away.

Well, Woopra seems mainly to be aimed at lower-volume (< 10,000 PIs/day) sites, principally blogs. And it focuses on providing very detailed, real-time data about on-site behavior. I have to say that I'm a bit of a skeptic about real-time data - it has the "wow" factor that helps to get people engaged with web analytics, but in all the years I've been in this industry I've only encountered one or two very specific cases where it could be genuinely useful, and even then, 20-minute old data would have been just as useful. Other features include real-time notifications and visitor tagging.

Boo!

The most interesting (and alarming) aspect of Woopra, though (which is linked to the real-time component) is the ability to launch a live chat session with someone visiting your site; so if you're watching someone blundering about the aisles of your virtual store, you can jump in and say "Hey! Looks like you're lost. Can I help?"

I can say in no uncertain terms that this would scare the bejesus out of me. It violates the (unwritten, unspoken) "pact" that exists between website users and owners; many users know at some level that their behavior is being tracked, but as long as that tracking doesn't get too "scary" (e.g. receiving an e-mail just after visiting a site that lists all the things you looked at), they're fairly comfortable. I predict that this feature will create significant discomfort for users; not to mention that it will be hard verging on impossible for a webmaster or site support person to monitor behavior accurately enough to actually justify jumping in and offering help. To be fair, the system does also allow the site user to initiate the chat, which is perfectly acceptable.

Reading this post back, I feel like a terrible old curmudgeon, criticizing this product - it has a kind of youthful enthusiasm to it that was once common in the industry but is now becoming less so as it matures (and now I can add condescending to my list of vices, too). I hope that Elie and his team can find a niche for it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please join me in putting your hands together to give a big Web Analytics Industry welcome to...

...Darrin Wood. [Applause]

Darrin joins the Gatineau (ok, ok, adCenter Analytics) team fresh from a stint in the Microsoft.com web analytics team, where he's spent 18 months working with our friends at WebTrends to make sure that we have the best data about the usage of our corporate website. Prior to which, he was employed by a certain well-known firm based out of Orem, Utah. So Darrin is pretty well-traveled from a web analytics point of view, and a great addition to the Analytics team.

Darrin's going to be stepping into the hole left by the departure of Justin Carder and leading product management for adCenter Analytics. To which end, you'll start seeing him popping up in all the usual places, like May's E-metrics Summit in San Francisco. Be sure to go up and say hi.

In other news, we now have a brand spanking new blog and forum for adCenter Analytics, located within the splendidness that is our new adCenter Community site. A shout-out to Mel Carson for the ton of work he's put in on this new site - it's a great resource for our adCenter customers to learn more about search marketing on adCenter and Analytics.

Finally, if you've requested access to the beta for adCenter Analytics, and haven't yet received your invite, then your wait should soon be over. Now that our beta refresh is out and we've worked through a couple of minor teething problems, we're looking to get up to date with requests for access, so you should get an invite code in the not-too-distant future.

News, news, news...

Sigh. Blog post topics seem to be like buses - you wait ages for one to come along, and then three come along all at once. Actually, I've got four things to post about, but I'm going to leave two until after the weekend. Here are the other two. Funnily enough, they're related - both are about benchmark data.

1. Compete.com cashes in

Online traffic benchmarking service Compete.com has been bought by UK-based market research firm TNS (Taylor Nelson Sofres). This is a good result for the folks at Compete, who have been waging a four-way battle with Quantcast, Alexa, and Comscore. Funnily enough the deal isn't stellar, despite the significant attention that Compete (and benchmarking services in general) has been getting recently - it's only a guaranteed $75m, with another $75m payable on achievement of revenue targets. Compete Inc has accepted about $43m in investment since it started in 2,000, so I guess the investors are pleased but not delighted.

The rest of TNS's business is pretty traditional market research stuff, so it'll be interesting to see how they integrate/expoit Compete's capabilities. Moving the footprint outside of the US seems like one obvious goal they may look to achieve in the not-too-distant future.

2. Google Analytics rolls out new data sharing feature

Logging onto Google Analytics this week, I was interested to see the new data sharing options that the product is making available:

So the key option in the above list is #2 - allowing GA to share your data with its "benchmarking service", where data from sites in a similar industry will be aggregated together for benchmark reports, like the sample below:

This is a smart thing for Google to do, as it provides an incentive for GA users to share their data by providing them with a solid benefit in return. It will be interesting to see how GA determines which industry a site is in; I guess they will mine the search index for those sites and use some behavioral targeting-type techniques to drop a site into a category based upon the words that appear on the site's pages. I have no idea how they'll categorize my site - they'll probably drop it into a "blogs" industry segment, since Google already knows that my site is a blog.

The other smart part of this move is to make it easy to turn off data sharing altogether. I presume that this means that no GA data will be used to inform decisions about, for example, keyword ranking in Adwords; though GA's terms of use are still a little vague on this point. As I was discussing with Brian Clifton a couple of weeks ago in London, our part of the web analytics industry (companies that offer services for free, and monetize the service indirectly) need to be super-clear about how the data is going to be used.

Trust me, I work for Microsoft

I am on the plane back from London after a fun few days with the folks there. It's always a pleasure to return to my home town, though it's a little strange returning there now that I don't live there any more, and rather eye-wateringly expensive now that I'm paid in dollars ($100 cab fare, anyone? How about an $8 tube ticket?).

Highlight of the trip was my panel session at SES London with Jim Sterne, Bryan Eisenberg, Brian Clifton of Google and Steve Jackson, discussing the future of web analytics in search. Our host, Kevin Ryan, quizzed us about the "rise" of the free tools and what tensions that would create with site owners (and their visitors) having to get used to sharing their data with companies like Google and Microsoft. Can we be trusted not to misuse the data entrusted to us for nefarious ends?

Brian was a little coy about this, insisting that for Google to misuse the data it gets from Google Analytics (for example, to manipulate bid pricing) would be tantamount to fraud, and so of course would be out of the question. I believe him, and believe the same of Microsoft too - it would be suicidal (not to mention morally reprehensible and howlingly naive) of Microsoft to take anything other than the greatest care with the data we collect from Gatineau. But - and let's not beat about the bush here - this data is of value to us, and the benefit we get from it subsidizes the development of free tools like GA and Gatineau. And we need to be open and honest about that.

Where Brian and I differed on the panel was that I can all too easily believe that the general public will not be totally reassured by any insistence we make that we will look after their data and only use it responsibly. Maybe this is because I work for a company that - how can I put it? - doesn't enjoy the highest levels of trust in the industry. For me, building trust in our stewardship of data is something that we have had to do day by day, brick by brick, but more importantly something that we will always need to continue to do - a garden that we will always need to tend, if you like.

It's certainly not enough simply to stay inside the law and expect to maintain user trust simply because nothing bad (like a data leak) has happened on our watch. Even if we feel we are doing everything right, if we stop trying to build trust, it will wither away.

The rest of the panel discussion passed without much incident, and afterwards I had a chance to have a good chat with Bryan (with a Y) about the plans that FutureNow are putting together to create a new class of offering in the site/campaign optimization/analytics space. I look forward to further announcements from Bryan on this soon.

The formalities (such as they were) of SES done, we retired to Spanish restaurant Moro (the name of which generated an impromptu "Who's on first base?" gag - "Where are we going?" "To Moro" "I thought we were going tonight" "We are, we're going to Moro" "We're going twice?" "No, just once - to Moro", "I thought you said we were going tonight", etc), where we were joined by my UK colleague and adCenter stalwart Mel Carson (whom you should sponsor), Rob Stevens of UK usability firm Bunnyfoot, and the inimitable Dennis Mortensen. A fine time was had by all, with Bryan E taking a number of deeply unflattering photos of us and uploading them via his mobile to Facebook.

And then, after dinner, for me, the highlight of the evening - finally meeting Dave Naylor (the man who leaked the screenshots of Gatineau back in August last year) in the flesh for the first time. And what a nice man he is.

Web Analytics is dead. Long live Web Analytics...

As if I don't have enough trouble keeping up a flow of posts on my own blog, I've now started to post on other peoples' blogs. Following my comment on Rene Dechamps Otamendi's post on Eric Peterson's new "The Future of Web Analytics, Demystified" blog, Eric invited me to write a post which further explained my thinking about the future of the Web Analytics industry - which is that "pureplay" Web Analytics vendors will disappear as Web Analytics is absorbed into allied services such as marketing automation, media planning/buying, and CRM. You can read the full post here. Don't agree with my thesis? Leave a comment.

Tags vs Logs: The big fight

There are many in the web analytics industry who could say (with some justification) that the tussle over whether to use client-side JavaScript tags or web server logs as your source of web analytics data has already been settled, with tags being declared the winner by a knockout. Certainly with Gatineau we've decided to place ourselves firmly in the tags corner (if you want to provide a hosted web analytics solution, and collect the data centrally, you really don't have any other option).

But logs aren't beat yet. Many vendors - Google, Webtrends, Clicktracks, WebAbacus, Site Intelligence to name a few - still offer the option to use logs as the primary data source. How come? Let's take a look at how this battle plays out.

 

Round 1: Convenience

Say what you like about accuracy (and you will, I'm sure), but you can't beat server logs for convenience. If you have the logs to hand, once you've installed your web analytics product, you simply point it at the logs, press the button, and sit back and wait for your data. There are wrinkles to be dealt with, for sure - you might have non-standard logs; you might have multiple web servers; or it might be difficult to gain access to the logs on your network (the three letters that strike fear into my heart? FTP), but most decent analytics tools can take these things in their stride.

Tag-based systems, by contrast, won't yield up a scrap of data until you've made code changes to your website and cut them live to your server. Then there's the hassle of ensuring that all the pages are tagged, and that pages don't become untagged at some later date when some developer looks at the code and thinks "what's this muck?" and removes it.

Round 1 winner: Logs

 

Round 2: Historical data

Straight back out of its corner after the success of round 1, logs delivers a second blow to tags: historical data. If you've been keeping your raw log files, a logs-based web analytics tool will be able to process that set of historical data and give you an instant picture of weeks, months or even years of activity on your site.

Tags just can't match this - the data only starts to be collected on the day you implement the tags, so you can't get a historical picture, by definition. This also makes it more challenging to move from one web analytics tools to another, since in the new tool you can't get a historical picture to ease the transition. It means that many companies leave their old tool in place for months whilst the new tool builds up a base of data - costly if you're paying for one or both tools.

Round 2 winner: Logs

 

Round 3: Visit and visitor counts

After its easy victories in the first two rounds, logs comes out with a swagger to square up on visit and visitor counts. But this time, tags is more than a match. Pretty much every tag-based analytics system serves up a persisitent cookie with the tag, and uses this cookie to sessionize the data (that is, build visits, by identifying page requests from the same user) and generate counts of unique users over longer periods of time. Once you've gone through the pain of instrumentation, this stuff comes pretty much for free, and is a great benefit.

It's perfectly possible to use cookies as user identifiers in a logs-based system; but firstly the site has to issue a cookie, and secondly that cookie has to be persistent and pervasive (i.e. every page should issue it if it isn't already present in the browser). This can be a royal pain to set up.

Round 3 winner: Tags

 

Round 4: Accuracy

With a win under their belt, the team in the tags corner is starting to feel a little more bullish. And, sure enough, when it comes to accuracy, tags give logs a run for its money. The main reason for this is that the actual tag request made by the JavaScript in a tag-based system cannot be cached; so every request made by a visitor ends up being recorded by the system that's listening out for the tag requests, resulting in pretty good accuracy at the page impression level

Log-based systems, on the other hand, are at the mercy of intermediate caches on the Internet - if a particular page (say, the home page) is relatively static and popular, a big subset of users will never hit the actual site's web server when they request that page - they'll be served a cached copy from a proxy somewhere between them and the site's server (probably at their ISP, or their corporate firewall). So a tag-based system can under-report page impressions by as much as 80% (though 40-50% is a more common figure). Worse still, the pages in a web site are not evenly cached, so a home page will be served from cache much more often than a deep page or a checkout page. This means that the shape of funnels can look screwy, and it is very difficult to determine anything other than broad traffic patterns.

Round 4 winner: Tags

 

Round 5: Non-HTML content

Not every web site is made up entirely of HTML. Come to that, not every transaction-based system that you might want to analyze the usage of is HTML based - for example, call center or IVR system usage. In these situations, log-based systems come into their own; many log-based analytics systems can turn their hand to a surprising number of analytics tasks, as long as the system they're analyzing the usage of can generate a log of its usage.

It used to be the case that this was a sucker punch for logs for non-HTML content on web sites too - but recently tag-based systems have got more adept at finding ways to track the usage of PDF files and other non-HTML content. Both Google Analytics and Gatineau have this functionality, for example.

Round 5 winner: A draw

 

Round 6: Sub-page events

Another knock-down for tags in this round. Sites which refresh content (manually or automatically) without executing a full page refresh present a particular challenge for web analytics tools of all stripes; but tag-based systems rise to the challenge much better than log-based ones. Increasingly, tag-based analytics tools offer the ability to attach a JavaScript event call to sub-page events, and track them as a separate kind of interaction (i.e. not a full-fledged page impression, but something worth counting nonetheless).

To pull this off with a log-based system, you'd have to modify your site code to generate a dummy log entry on your web server (perhaps by requesting a non-existent HTML file), and then, whilst processing the data, treat this HTML file and others like it as a special case, ensuring the analytics system doesn't accidentally count it as a page impression. It's doable, but gnarly, gnarly, gnarly. And I don't know of any log-based analytics system which implement a sub-page event model (perhaps someone can enlighten me via the comments box).

Round 6 winner: Tags

 

Round 7: Data integration

The team in the tags corner cries foul at this point, pointing out that data integration is more a function of whether you run your analytics system in-house or have it hosted as a third-party service; and that there are plenty of web analytics tools which can combine tag-based data collection with an in-house service. But there's a strong correlation between logs/tags and in-house/hosted, so the referee allows the fight to continue.

In-house systems do make data integration easier. A log-based analytics system will capture all the user identifiers (in cookies, typically), including those used by the site's own CMS, and a half-way decent web analytics tool will allow these identifiers to be extracted and then used as a key for the import of related data (for example, the purchase history of a known customer).

Because tag-based systems tend to send their tag request to a third-party server (the web analytics provider's data collection server), these cookies are not automatically captured. You can modify or customize the tag script for some tools to capture identity cookie values as variables, but then you're still left with the challenge of importing potentially sensitive customer data across the Internet. Data protection laws in the EU and US state that in order to use customer data for this "secondary use" and transfer it to a third party, you have to get the customer's explicit permission - something that most site owners are reluctant to do, for obvious reasons.

Round 7 winner: Logs (kinda)

 

The final score

Finally the competitors stagger back to their corners, bloody but unbowed. After some debate, the judges declare the final score to be:

Tags: 3,    Logs: 2½

So, a closer result than you might think. Tagging wins out (just) because of the better quality of the data it yields up; although it's a pain to instrument a site, you immediately get access to pretty good-quality, well sessionized data that you can start to build reports around. Logs are much more of a struggle to get set up to deliver good quality data, but once you're there you have as much flexibility as with a tag-based system, and more in some respects (for example, in the area of data integration).

Web Analytics in the movies

So if you thought you were destined to spend the rest of your life explaining what web analytics is to bored-looking people at cocktail parties, think again, because Sony Pictures is about to take the industry mainstream (kinda) with the release of Untraceable, a movie about a serial killer who uses real-time traffic data from site visitors to decide how quickly to kill people. I always knew it was a dark art...

One of the more amusing details about the movie is the location that it was filmed in - none other that Portland, Oregon, home of Webtrends, and, of course, the one and only Eric Peterson. Anything you want to tell us, Eric? ;-)

It's here

The wait is finally over. Beta 1 of our "Gatineau" web analytics product is finally open for business! Today, Monday October 29 (coincidentally, Justin's birthday - happy birthday, Justin), we've started sending out beta signup invitation codes.  So what can you expect in beta 1? Here's the run-down:

 

Demographic segmentation

As previously trailed, demographic segmentation - the ability t0 compare the behavior of men vs women, or different age groups who are using your site - is a key feature of Gatineau. All of Gatineau's tabular reports support this segmentation capability, so you can compare bounce rates across segments, for example, or see which of your marketing campaigns played well with women, and which with men.

Custom taxonomies

A neat feature of Gatineau beta 1 which hasn't had much air-time is the ability to define a custom taxonomy (i.e. site structure) as you're instrumenting your site. So, for example, if you use a CMS to manage your site, you can map the document hierarchy from your CMS into the instrumentation, and see this in the Gatineau reports. When you're viewing page reports you can then select the custom taxonomy from the "Browse" menu drop-down at the top of the report box.

Funnel Report

Of course, no web analytics product would be complete without a funnel report. We've put a bunch of effort into the one inside Gatineau - as well as providing a nice visualization of the drop-out through a defined process, it also shows the top entry points into the funnel, and the top exit destinations.

Outbound link tracking

Kinda kicking myself that I didn't mention this at E-metrics last week in DC, given that Google then announced the same functionality the next day, but 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.

Inbound referrals

Gatineau's Inbound Referrals report is pretty much what you'd expect it to be; however, it includes a very useful "Not Referred" group which shows the amount of direct traffic to the site (i.e. people typing in the URL directly, or clicking on a link in an e-mail or other non-referrer-generating source).

ROI reports

One of Gatineau's main goals is to provide marketers with a real view of how successful their marketing activities are. Beta 1 provides four ROI reports to achieve this - a Campaign Overview report which provides an all-up picture of marketing effectiveness, and E-mail, Banner and Offline Campaigns reports which provide more detail for - you've guessed it - e-mail, banner and offline campaigns. We're still working out some technical details to integrate paid search data properly into Gatineau, and when we do, paid search (including automatic integration with Microsoft adCenter paid search) will appear in this report group.

Goal analysis

Every website has goals - even ones which don't take money from people. Gatineau's Goals report shows how many visitors are reaching the goals you've defined for your site, so you can decide if you're being successful or not.

Client system reports

Gatineau contains the usual array of reports about your users' location and browser set-up. So, for example, you can see whether you can design your site based upon a 1024 x 768 resolution, or whether you still need to stick to 800 x 600.

 

Other stuff you need to know

There are some other things to bear in mind about this beta. The first is, if you've requested a beta invite, you'll be on the list and will receive one in due course - but remember, some people have been in the line since January, so please be patient as we ramp up users slowly; there's no need to remind us that you're waiting.

The other thing that it's worth reiterating here is that if you don't have an adCenter account already, you'll have to pay $5 to set one up in order to get access to the beta at this stage. Yes, we know this is - how can I put this? - regrettable. It's a strictly temporary situation that has arisen for no other reason than some development timeline issues internally. As soon as we can remove the $5 requirement, we will, rest assured.

Resources & Feedback

To coincide with this beta launch, we're putting some resources in place to help you get the best out of the beta. The first is a "Web Analytics" discussion board on our adCenter forum, at the following URL:

http://forums.microsoft.com/adcenter

Secondly, we'll be posting official announcements about Gatineau on the official adCenter blog, at the following URL:

http://adcenterblog.spaces.live.com/

Thirdly, even though Gatineau's just in beta, we have support folk lined up to answer your queries. You can access this support through Gatineau's online help system. Just click the "Get more help" link in the bottom right of the help window for any Gatineau help topic (the Gatineau UI is peppered with helpful little question marks which you can click to get help about that page). We're testing out our support as well as our software in this process, so we need you to try it out and let us know what you think.

Fourthly, you can send us feedback about Gatineau using the following online form:

Gatineau Feedback Form

Please feel free to send us any feedback at all that you have about the product based upon actual usage of it. If you don't have access to Gatineau yet, or you want to give us feedback about the product in general, or the beta process, please use the forum.

And finally, if you haven't requested access to the beta yet, you can do so at the following URL:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/gatineau

And finally...

We're incredibly proud of this beta, even as we know that we have a good deal of work still to do. We hope you enjoy using the product that we've put together. And I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everybody at Microsoft who's worked on the project thus far, and also our friends outside the organization who've taken the time to give us the benefit of their opinions about the project.

Another peek at Gatineau

Following on from my Gatineau movies last week, my colleague Justin Carder has appeared in a video interview shot by the folks over at VisitMixx, talking about Gatineau and showing some more of its functionality. Justin is becoming quite the media personality, it seems. Sadly his rise to fame comes a little late for us here - Justin is leaving Microsoft to go on to pastures new. So if you're interested in working for Microsoft and having a very significant influence on the direction of this exciting project, at a pretty darn exciting time for the company (what with the aQuantive acquisition, and all), please get in touch. Contact details on my about page.

And Justin, it's been a pleasure working with you on the Gatineau project. May you find great success with your new (ad)venture!

The skinny on Gatineau

Another E-metrics conference draws to a close (minus me, as it happens - I'm already back in Seattle). Highlights for me included the chocolates and cigars provided (as ever) by Rene, and the hospitality shown by Jim in inviting us all back to his (absolutely enormous) room at about 12.30 am until we were kicked out by the hotel management for disturbing the other guests.

For those of you unable to come to DC to see my demo of Gatineau, or if you were there but feel like you missed something as I whizzed haphazardly through the stuff I had to show, here are some screen-cap movies of the features that I focused on in the demo. First up, logging into Gatineau:

Things to note here are that Gatineau lives within the Microsoft adCenter UI; as I've previously posted, you'll need an adCenter account to gain access to Gatineau. At the moment this means you have to give us $5, but this requirement will go away in due course.

Once you've logged in, you can set up multiple profiles to manage the web analytics data associated with the sites that you want to analyze. And, of course, in order to get data into a profile, you have to take the Gatineau tracking code and put it into your pages. Applying tracking scripts is still the #1 barrier to web analytics adoption, so we decided to make it easier by adding some automation to the process: [Note: this is a beta 2 feature]

A key thing to note about this functionality is that we've implemented it as a browser plug-in; so, although it makes an FTP connection to your web server (and therefore requires you to provide username and password information), this information isn't sent to Microsoft, and we don't store it. So there's no chance of us stealing your login, logging into your webserver, and changing all your website text to say, "Microsoft rocks!", or something like that.

Finally, here's a video of the reporting UI, showing the segmentation functionality, and something that I didn't show on Monday - the funnel report. Note that the data in this demo system is rather funky - we've been deliberately throwing all sorts of odd data at the test system to try to break it, which is why the funnel has an odd look to it. Your funnels will look like funnels, I promise!

I'm not going to post videos of the Campaign or Treemap visualizations, because they're still in development. More information on these soon. I should be able to post pretty soon about the beta 1 availability date. So watch this space...

See you in DC

I'm off to Washington DC on Sunday (along with the rest of the web analytics industry) for the E-metrics Marketing Optimization Summit. On Monday morning at 10.30 I'll be standing up in front of the entire class (about 600 people - eek) to show how Microsoft's been getting on with its homework assignment. Wish me luck - perhaps I'll get an apple from teacher. Or maybe I'll just get pushed off the swings by Mo.

[If you're going to DC, I'll be there from late Sunday evening until Tuesday afternoon. Please do come and say hello. I'm staying at the Omni Shoreham, so you may find me in the bar there on Monday night]

Famous for fifteen minutes

As you may have already read (you're probably here because you linked through from one of the stories in the Internet), I used my presentation at OX2's Web Analytics Day last Friday to talk about the upcoming "Gatineau" beta 1 release and a little about some of the stuff we're working on for subsequent beta releases. It seems like the presentation was well received; you can view the slides here and here, or (if you're really a glutton for punishment) view Rene's video of the presentation here.

One thing I'd stress again is that all the slides from "Campaign Visualization" onward (except the last one - that's in there in error) represent stuff that we're working on for future beta releases of Gatineau. So if you get the chance to get into beta 1, you won't see this functionality.

It was fun to travel to Brussels (especially on the oh-so-civilized Eurostar) and catch up with Rene, Aurelie, Eric and Dennis, and to meet Robin Wauters of Blognation, Marianina Chaplin,  and the legendary Wandering Dave Rhee, who has now wandered all the way to Frankfurt (for some reason, given his moniker, I had a vision of Dave as a long-haired hippy type, so did a double-take when I met him in person (yes, I know, I should just have checked out his profile page for a nice photo of him)). Dave, best of luck with OX2 and your new life in Frankfurt - I hope you enjoy it as much as I'm enjoying being in the US. It was also great to see my colleagues Andzrej and Cristian, two members of our development team in Dublin who are actually responsible for creating many of the things that I showed on the screen. Thanks guys!

Your next chance to see Gatineau (and me) in the flesh will be at the E-metrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC in October (14-17, to be exact).  Book your ticket now!

Oh, and if you want to request access to the Gatineau beta, go here.