One area that Google and Microsoft will soon compete in is providing information to Internet-based businesses about traffic to their sites.
Given that Microsoft is months away from introducing its own Web analytics facets, an actual head-to-head comparison between Microsoft and Google Analytics is impossible right now.
But some corporate IT network managers are making it anyway, based on the information that’s available about what Microsoft’s doing.
You see, Microsoft plans to enter this space using technology from Web analytics provider DeepMetrix, a well-established player with hundreds of major Web site customers.
So there’s something to line up against Google’s own Google Analytics, which has been slowly winning a following among Web masters.
Just who’s winning? To place one company over another would be patently unfair at this point. Perhaps more important to note is that consumers are beginning to compare the two.
Consider this head-to-head test documented by Mark Lowe, chief technology officer of Strategic Advantage.
He wrote here that his firm was using DeepMetrix, but they could never properly install the system. He wrote that the firm then turned to Urchin, the software that Google now provides, “and it installed in minutes. We use Google Analytics ourselves and for our clients.”
Of course he’s just one opinion, representing only one level of technical sophistication and one set of circumstances.
And others out there are jumping for joy over Microsoft’s choice of DeepMetrix, and pooh-pooh the limits that Google Analytics has on number of Web pages to examine.
The only thing really certain at this point is there are going to be more opinions and comparisons of the two Web analytics features to come.