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.

Responding to much public hue and requests, Google Official blog announces 'New Features Added to Google Analytics'. Here's a quick look of the changes:

• Hourly Reporting: A feature called "View by: Daily/Hourly" switch has been added through which you can opt whether you want to view your date hourly or daily.
• Clickable URLs: click straight through to external pages from links referenced in reports.
• Cross Segmentation by Network Location: Now you are capable of cross segmenting reports based on Network Location.

CMS Watch says Google Analytics is "not yet enterprise ready".

Phil Kemelor, the Head Analyst who was incharge of the report said, "Google can rightly boast that its Google Analytics service can process enterprise-level web metrics loads. But there's more to analytics than processing: integration, support, and documentation can be decisive to e-marketing success."

Elaborating on their decision, CMS Watch wrote:

Hot on the heels of the Google Analytics makeover which we reported two days ago followed a similar transformation by other smaller sites.

As with ever new product, there was bound to be clashing opinion and one new user rants about the new interface not being user friendly for newcomers. Besides, the new main dashboard graph no longer shows visits and pageviews together. Viewing pageviews is not so easy, considering one has to change to another graph making it utterly impossible to compare trends. Also, in the new version, one cannot view the statistics for the entire year. Whereas, previously all it required was one click.

Google Analytics has undergone nip, tuck and is here with a renewed and fancier look. Brett Crosby and Jeff Veen launched the latest version at the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco.

Google combined forces with Urchin, which they purchased back in 2005 for the final result. Some of the new features include:

• Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.