Recently, adCenter Analytics had announced an upgrade to adCenter Analytic. For those of you who still are a little clueless, adCenter Analytics is a free web analytics tool that helps you easily understand web site user engagement and online marketing campaign performance. A user can then track the audience behaviour from click to conversion, segment data by age and gender or simply run a report to see how many visitors have accessed the site, where they came from and what content they looked at.

Formerly known as “Project Gatineau,” Microsoft’s analytics tool is the counterpart of the Google Analytics. Launched in July last year, the tool saw its international release just a couple of weeks back.

And now the Redmond giant declares the launch of an upgrade “We’re pleased to announce a recent upgrade to adCenter Analytic,” says Mel, adCenter Community Team.

Microsoft announced today to open up its Gatineau Analytics for international users as well, "Due to the overwhelming demand from customers outside the United States, we have decided to open up the web analytics beta and invite customers from international adCenter markets," expressed the official statement.

Till now the analytics service of Microsoft was available only to the customers in the United States. All the customers from the UK, France and Canada who have expressed an interest in using the program should receive an invitation very soon.

Analytics are important to help you build a brand and to effectively promote your website. The criticality of blogs cannot be understated in helping you build your brand and credibility. There are many parameters and metrics which can help you mold and control your campaign for promoting your blog. In an insightful blog post Lee Odden has compiled a list of analytic tools for assessing a blog's performance.

Microsoft launches Gatineau Web Analytics informs the official adCenter Blog. Apparently, this feature is fit for beta testing and the first invitations are now being sent to customers. All advertisers can request an invitation here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/microsoft-adcenter-gatineau.

"Project Gatineau's web analytics are useful to sites of all sizes – from smaller sites that can't afford an expensive web analytics solution to larger sites looking for a boost in their web analytics capabilities. With the Gatineau beta, you can learn more about where your visitors come from and easily measure your marketing campaigns across any medium and from any traffic source.

With the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit as platform, Urchin founder Brett Crosby announced several Google Analytics features that will be ready for use within a few weeks.

Back in July, Dave Naylor had some images of Gatineau. Now, two months later, Web Analytics Demystified has official images of screenshots of Microsoft Gatineau.

In Blognation, in an article called "First Look at Microsoft’s Free Web Analytics Tool ‘Gatineau’ (With Slides)", Robin described the aims of Gatineau as:

• Out-of-the-box demographic segmentation
• Integrated view of marketing campaign effectiveness
• Integration of conversion value data
• Innovative visualisation of behavioural data

Many Webmasters on WebmasterWorld are reporting technical errors in Google Analytics.

One user, lruellan eloquently wrote to Google Analytics explaining and describing the technical errors as:

"Two weeks ago, I noticed a significant drop in GA's reported visits, not reflected in Webtrends. While GA used to show about 2k visits less than Webtrends, suddenly, it was reporting over 12k less visits for the same days. After a few days, the issue resolved itself, and Google came back to matching Webtrends in the > 95% range. Then, yesterday, Google shows a huge drop again, with the number of visits being half of what's in Webtrends (18k visits in GA, 32k in Webtrends)."

Gatineau, the latest from Microsoft which is to directly compete with Google Analytics is garnering a lot of praise even before it has been released on beta.

LiveSide, Microsoft's official news blog writes, "

Gatineau will allow users, once they have set up a profile and added a tracking script to their blog or website, to:

• View reports
• Manage goals
• Manage campaigns

Alden DeSoto of the Google Analytics team has a post which discusses Google Analytics' new features.

New features include:

• “A "Go to:" box to all reports that have tables so you can jump directly to a specific row. If you have 5,000 referring sources and you want to see row 3,456, you can jump right to it.
• The Map Overlay report view now defaults to Country instead of Subcontinent.