Gatineau Analytics: Walkthrough and Details

Posted By: Joshua Allen | Oct 22nd, 2007 @ 1:46 PM

Update: It's here! You can read more on Ian's blog.

It's been reported that our new analytics tool, code-named Gatineau, will be public any day now. In anticipation, we put together this walkthrough and in-depth interview with Justin Carder from the Gatineau team.

As has been widely-reported, Gatineau is pretty much the only offering out there which lets you see gender, age, and other relatively accurate demographic information about your site's visitors. And all this without you ever having to ask your visitors to divulge information or otherwise pry into their privacy.

Some of the highlights from the interview: Gatineau is fully hosted, and plans are for the service to be made free. There is no need to share your server logs or otherwise perform heavyweight integration with Microsoft. You simply add a line of JavaScript to your HTML, which creates a first-party cookie.

Privacy is protected, in part, by correlating Windows Live's demographic information (some of the most accurate in the business) in aggregate only, and on Microsoft's servers rather than yours.

Interestingly, Gatineau is designed to work seamlessly with adCenter campaigns, but also allows you to import and correlate with campaigns from other services -- for example, existing campaigns in aQuantive.

The walkthrough starts a few minutes in (Justin and I are looking at a plasma off-camera if you wonder during the cutscenes); then the more in-depth questions come at the latter half.

Justin wraps up by encouraging you to sign up here, and stay tuned for announcements about MIX08, where Gatineau team member Ian Thomas is planning to present.

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Duncan

We'll be using Gatineau on this site, along with several others in the near future... maybe we should report back after a few weeks/months to discuss what data we gathered?