In 1857 Queen Victoria decided to place the capital of Canada in a remote lumber village called Ottawa situated where the Rideau, Ottawa and Gatineau rivers meet. One-hundred and fifty years later, the city has become famous for the world’s longest skating rink (five blocks from our Ottawa office), for an excellent NHL team (dramatically superior to those Maple Leaf bums) and, as of three days ago, as the home to Microsoft’s competition for Google Analytics.
The good folks at Microsoft are not announcing many details. But Ian Thomas has acknowledged that they are in alpha trials of a hosted web analytic solution that has Google Analytics in the cross-hairs. Microsoft purchased DeepMetrix in May of last year and is using their LiveStat product line as the framework for the new offering, currently code-named Gatineau.
What we do know about Gatineau
- The product is in alpha stage and is having its tires kicked by a very select group of invitees. Ian Thomas invites anyone interested in becoming a beta tester to let him know.
- There is a significant team committed to this project. DeepMetrix had a staff of about 35 when it was acquired and we expect half of that number were developers. Apparently Microsoft has quadrupled the development team since the acquisition. This suggests that something like 70 developers are coding away on Gatineau.
- When Google launched its analytics offering, it was immediately swamped with requests and had to take drastic steps to limit accessibility. Microsoft is likely to release Gatineau to a small group initially – I would expect key advertisers – to avoid these scaling challenges
- DeepMetrix is actually located in Hull, the small city facing Parliament Hill across the Ottawa River and the Ontario/Quebec divide. But then Hull was amalgamated with the town of Gatineau in a spate of provincial foolishness. And now Microsoft is stuck with a code name based on this unfortunate political decision. Sigh.
What This Means for Marketers
Much remains unclear – how Microsoft will price Gatineau, its feature set, etc. – but the release of a Google Analytics competitor will have an impact on marketers:
- Low-end web analytics has become a commodity – Gatineau simply reinforces this trend. Expect two outcomes:
- Many lower-end or under-financed web analytic firms will disappear.
- The Gartner Group’s 2Q ‘06 MarketScope for Web Analytics report is probably correct that a “third wave of web analytics” will embrace cross-channel reporting and analysis.
- Competition for marketers able to interpret web analytics appropriately, design campaigns with measurement in mind, understand metrics-driven improvement, will continue to intensify. The gene pool is small and the demand is large.
- We expect the availability of tools combined with the difficulty in finding qualified marketers will drive a need for frameworks – guidelines for mapping objectives to tactics to traceable metrics. Our own Performance Framework addresses this need.
Finally, the entry of Microsoft into the space is not likely to clear the confusion that web 2.0 initiatives and AJAX-based sites have introduced to web analytics. Determining how to measure user behaviour – and using that measurement to improve results – is exponentially more complicated when users create and control content, or interaction happens at the browser not the server.
Our advice to vendors? If you want to survive in a world where the giants are giving software away for free, find a way to address the web 2.0 metrics challenge. Quickly