Heres another bit of MS vs Google thats getting interesting as well.

In response to Google buying Urchin and releasing it as Google Analytics, Microsoft bought DeepMetrix at the beginning of May 2006. They announced it less than a week before announcing they’d bought Massive Inc. Why? Because adCenter needed a metrics application to go with it of course.

Whats timely is that this new “Microsoft Analytics” program has been spotted out in the wild as an alpha project. And then a few days later we get an interview showing up from the original founder of Urchin.

I really think that one of the things that marketers and webmasters should look at is how many resources it takes to get up running and actually pull the analysis out and using their analytics tool, and then using the data to drive actionable decisions. And that’s one of the things that we focus on a lot, is just from the time you decide to implement the analytics to the time you are actually able to make decisions. To me that’s a big piece of the game right now. We have AdWords, which helps you drive traffic to your site. We have analytics that helps you understand what your traffic is doing, and where your website has problems. And we also have tools such as the recently launched Website Optimizer tool, which is a multivariate-testing platform that helps you perform content testing on your site.

Interview of Google Analytics’ Brett Crosby – Stone Temple Consulting

Its actually a really good interview and offers a pretty decent glimpse in to how Urchin and Google Analytics do the tricks they do. For example, I didn’t realise that the standalone Urchin product is actually still available for purchase through channel resellers. That interests me personally, especially that its still branded Urchin.

Measuring statistics on your website is unbelievably difficult. There is no sure fire way of being able to track visitors to your sites short of going through the log files themselves, and even that requires a lot of interpretation and filtering to weed out the noise (such as spam bots or web crawlers.)

I do kind of keep track of the statistics of my sites. Not so much this blog anymore since I moved back to hosting it on Blogger itself, but all my other sites where I can go through the access lots themselves. Its truly not easy filtering out the chaff from the wheat, but the end result is some pretty useful information.

A while ago there was a pretty significant debate on Slashdot about whether web metrics were of any value at all. The argument being that a visitor to your site doesn’t equate to anything more than a browser opening a page. Whether that page read or not in general. Site traffic means nothing… However, those that took this line were also obviously people that have absolutely no web based advertising experience at all. Whether they like it or not, website metrics are important.

And this is partly why Microsoft’s small fingers into this field are a big deal. This leaves Yahoo! as the sole remaining of the big online advertising companies that still hasn’t branched into this area yet. And that will affect them.

Advertisers like to keep track of things like conversions and so on. They like to know how many people clicked on their ads, visited their site and bought their product. They want to know how well their ads are actually performing and which ads seem to be more successful with what markets.

No matter what you think about web statistic analysis software, this information is very relevant. Especially once you’ve figured out how to filter out the chaff in your logs ;-)

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