After acquiring Gatineau, Quebec based DeepMetrix Corporation last year, Microsoft is working on its own version of a free analytics offering – aptly code-named “Gatineau”, to be released sometime in 2007.

My take: Bring ‘em on.  Every site owner should use a form of analytics that goes beyond the often pathetic offerings that are provided by the various ISPs as part of a hosting package.  Competition is healthy, but – judging by earlier efforts – Microsoft has their work cut out for them.  AdCenter, for one, despite having the benefit of hindsight, is stil lagging behind Google AdWords in many aspects.

For marketers, this is definitely great news…

Chris

It is no secret that Google makes a ton of money not just by displaying ads on its search engine results pages, but also by syndicating them to related content pages via Google Adsense.  This, in turn, has helped a large number of web sites turn a profit, since they get a share of revenue whenever one of their site visitors clicks on a Google Ad.  (Note: both of these venues can be highly effective for advertisers as well – more on that in a later post….)

Until now, Microsoft has not actively promoted their alternative to Google AdSense.  This may change shortly.  I just came across this nifty review of Microsoft ‘AdSense‘ – (Better known as the Microsoft AdCenter). From what it appears, they still have a lot of catching up to before they can hope to make any serious inroads into Google’s dominance. 

It looks like they haven’t quite figured out how web site owners will make more money with the Microsoft way of doing things.  Until then, Google has nothing to fear…

Time will tell.