adCenter Analytics (Beta) – My Experiences

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I recently said Goodbye Google Analytics, and hello AdCenter.

AdCenter Analytics is Microsoft's web analytics projects formerly codenamed Gatineau. The basic concept is the service allows you to embed a small amount of JavaScript into your webpages and it will track all traffic to the site. This technique has been used for many years now by various providers of website traffic analytics and im very excited to see us get into the same product offering.

Now lets talk about some of the details on my experience getting started with AdCenter Analytics.

Getting Started

After getting my account activated I entered the website and registered by blog by creating a profile:

Once my blog was registered a small customized javascript snippet was provided and I installed it into my master blog HTML template that would ensure it appears on every page.

By the next day my profile Status showed GREEN as traffic was being recorded and I was ready to look at the reports, which is really the heart of this system.

Reports

The interface is very clean, for a complete demo checkout the official website but here are some snippets:

The above image shows the various statistics AdCenter Analytics is able to track, very useful information such as:

• Number of Unique visitors
• Referrals (where traffic is coming from, search engines or direct links)
• Visitor Information such as the browser, operating system, screen resolution and even the language of my visitors
• And many more as you can see above

Within the first full day of tracking my site had already hit 165 unique visitors:

and I was able to see such things like most people had at least 1024x768 as their screen resolution: 

I am also able to analyze where people are coming from and if they are new or returning visitors. This is great to gauge the kind of traffic and audience that comes to my blog.

Interface

I really cannot say enough nice things about the interface, its clean and intuitive as this example can show:

Clicking on the various duration bars above such as the week in the first screenshot (marked goldish/yellow) or month in the second resets all the statistics below it to show the data for this period.

Also almost all the graphical representations in reports can be highlighted with the mouse for the full detail, again a very helpful feature:

Still Beta

As i continued to explore the system I did find that features such as Print, Email and Exporting of reports was not still implemented:

This is understandable as this is a relatively new (and complex) product that will take time to development and bring into its first release, this is a BETA after all.

My Impression

Now that I got to fully play with the product I must say I am very impressed. Two advantages already stand out for me over Google’s product:

• Cleaner sleek looking interface
• Relatively “real time” statistics (see the word “Live data” below)

I’ve confirmed with the product group that this data is in fact being made available to reporting within hours of it being gathered. For me is a clear winning feature and my hope is it will continue to be this way. (As anyone who’s designed such systems knows, this is not an easy feature to pull off)

Closing

For more information and to signup for the service visit their office website at:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter-analytics

or check out their team blog which has a very good collection of informational posts and resources:

http://www.adcentercommunity.com/blogs/analytics/