Marketing Pilgrim

Between Dave Naylor’s screen grabs and Microsoft’s own Ian Thomas sharing some info, details are starting to come out for Microsoft’s upcoming Google Analytics challenger.

Gatineau will launch in beta later this summer and I’m assuming will be completely free, in order to compete with Google and give AdCenter advertisers detailed stats on their campaigns.

Gatineau promises to take analytics one step further with the addition of demographic data.

Beta 1 will include the ability to segment data by both age and gender buckets, so you can get more of an idea of what kind of visitors you have.

Of course, this sets off all manner of alarm bells - it happens anytime a major search engine discusses user data - but Thomas is quick to stress that no personally identifiable data will be used.

…we do get this information from users’ Live ID (formerly known as Microsoft Passport) profiles, but I would stress that we get this information anonymously, and there is no use of PII (Personally Identifiable Information, such as name or e-mail address) in the product.

Google Analytics has already had a major face lift this summer, but Gatineau should provide enough competition to keep the improvements coming.

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