First remarks on Microsoft Adcenter

I've been test driving Microsoft Adcenter, Analytics or Gatineau (why can't the even be consistent throguhout their own site) for several weeks now and here are my remarks on the system.

Each time I go and have a look, and that's often because Microsoft Adcenter, appart from Google Analytics, updates my stats several times a day, I have to type in my password again. Eventhough I have ticked the box remember me. I imagine this is for security reasons, but Google doesn't do it, why should Microsoft (don't they want to copy everything Google does?).

Then when I'm logged in most of the time I get an error, telling me to try again later. It's getting better but it seems as if they can't handle the server load. Eventhough they are only letting a small number of people join the Beta each time. It probably has to do with the fact that they update stats more often, which I like, but if this disables the system, why not get more servers or lower the refresh rate.

Then when I eventually get to see my stats I finally begin to enjoy what Microsoft has put together for us. Viaully everything is tiptip and the month-week-day overview takes a little getting used to, but provides easy navigation, and just looks damn nice.

But then when I want to see what keywords my visitors use to find my site, I need to dig deep within referals->inbound referals->view contents of group search->select a search engine and view it's content->view the content of the group 'phrase'->select the contents of whatever domain was used for searching->and then I'm finally there.
And then I can't even see all searches done, by all search engines and all search engine domains. If I'm doing this the wrong way, please let me know (I know you could also use Browse, but describing this isn't as dramatic). If there is no other way: Microsoft, rethink your navigation and get your priorities straight.
Everybody using web-analytics wants to see what keywords users are using to find their site. It's almost the most important thing.

That's all for now. But more reviews are to come.

Microsoft Adcenter can't handel traffic

The last couple of days Microst Adcenter doesn;t seem to be able to handle allthe requests as i keep getting the following message:

We're sorry, but adCenter is experiencing a problem that prevents it from continuing. Information that can help resolve the problem is now being sent to the adCenter site maintenance team. You can return to the Microsoft adCenter sign-in page now, or sign in again later. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.

The were planning to open the system to Beta tester gradually to avoid the same problems Google had with their anlaytica launch, but problems keep arrizing.

Some times I am kicked out while viewing my stats, but most of the times I can;t even get in. I hope they resolve this.

Accepted to Microsoft Analytics Beta

Today I've been accepted to participate in the Microsoft Analytics Beta. I set up my websites and although it still was a little slow all went well. No I'll have to wait a day for my stats to become active.

Very soon i'll start reviewing Microsoft Analytics and posting my findings on this blog.

Keep coming back!

Interview with Ian Thomas

After the presentation on Friday Robin Wauters interviewed Ian Thomas about Microsoft Analytics.

The interview can be read here:

One of the new features of Microsoft Analytics will be the incorperation of demographic data through Microsoft LiveID system. Weather this will have concequences for privacy was answered by Ian whith:

“Believe it or not, but Microsoft and myself are very much aware of the privacy concerns, and we do everything in our power to act according all privacy regulations. The data we collect, although linked to a Windows Live account, is related to an anonymous ID and remains anonymous at all times. We can’t, and won’t extract any identifiable data from the samples we use for socio-demographic data mining; rest assured that we take this very seriously. We don’t want to follow other providers when it comes to privacy, we want to lead the way.”

Also as Microsoft has learned from previous mistakes made by Googles Analytics they will probably increase user numbers slowly to not overrun the system. Make sure you sign up for the Beta now to be one of the first.

Ian says:

“We’ve been collecting e-mail addresses from early adopters who want to test-drive the beta release on our project website for some time now. I can’t give you an exact timing, but we will be sending out the first beta invitations before the end of this month. We need to be careful and ramp up the sign-ups in a measured way, so we can take our time to test the software’s performance and scalability, and test the support.”

Microsoft Analytics Video

Last Friday the Web Analytics Day 2007 was held in Brussels. Microsofts Ian Thomas provided the visitors with a short (19 minutes) presentation of the New Microsoft Analytics (project Gatineau).

Have fun viewing the video!



The video of this presentation can also be seen here.


Not only the Analytics tool is ellaborated on but also Microsofts view on targeted advertising. They empasize their ability to provide Gender Targeting (ie. Girl or man mobile phones). But also their view on how several ads/emails or SERP results seen by the same user can lead to this user buying the product, not imediately, but after several days. How do you track a conversion of this kind when the ad/email or link the that lead to this conversion can't be distinguished.

BUT, also some long expected screenshots are presented.
Some thing I liked:
-The overview of month week day: for easy acces to reports on certain periods.
-The ability to descriminate between: age, gender & occupation in the report, to see what kind of people you are recieving. (this information is gathered from Microsofts LiveID and they claim it still is conform privacy rules.)
-The campaign visualization, showing a timeline and activity of you different campaigns.

-The path visualization and the most popular pages visualization justed seem to have been rethought and presented differently. THis may be easier to read, but might lack detail for most users.


Note, earlier I said (two posts back): that the Funnel visualization data screenshots (provided by Dave Naylor) is using weird mathematics. Ian Thomas explanes this is fake data in this video.
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Gatineau Page seems down

The Gatineau login page: http://gatineau.adcenter.microsoft.com/Gatineau/

Seems to have suffered an Server error for quite some time now. I don't know if it has moved, but I do know Beta testers are logging in through Microsoft Adcenter website.

Sloppy to leave this old Gatineau page like this!

More links about: gatineau

Microsoft Analytics Screenshots

A while back a Gatineau Beta tester leaked some Microsft Analytics screenshots. Dave Naylor posted them on his blog here.

Here are the previews:
navigation & activity breakdown:


Funnel visualization:


Gender visualization:


The screens look great and everything has gotten a cool but totally useless 3d look But this can be toggled in the options tab above a graph. Plus other graph visualizations can be chosen here.

It's cool they provide funnel visualization, but I guess Google does too, so they had to. The new Gender tool seems to be working on data Microsoft collects from users logged into MSN (or any other micorosft service) while visiting your page.

Also DaveN claims Microsoft Analytics will be able to track your Adwords advertisement data just like Google does. But I'm still wandering how they would do that. They can't probably know about your campaigns & ads. Or would they request your Google password for this and steal the data from Google Analytics.

Also, some wierd stuff can be observed when studying the images carefully.

-In the Activity breakdown The '% of visits' bar misses it's end graphic.
-In the Funnel visualization there's something weird with the math 187% & 97%, while there are as many visitors at the end of the Funnel as there are at the beginning: 693,918.
-In the gender visualizations it's wierd there are more Entry or Exit pages than pageviews. This just doesn't seem logical.


I know they are still in Beta, but I hope I'm either wrong or these issues will be resolved.