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…