While Microsoft is developing the “next generation of analytics”, Google’s competing product keeps letting its users down. The recent outage, which lasted two days straight, was the fourth outage in the month of July alone.
Ever since Google Analytics became free, more and more webmasters have been counting on it as their sole stats provider and like any other free service out there, users start to realize that you always get “what you pay for” and in this case it is a very unreliable platform. As noted by Chrissy Icamina, web producer for FHM Philippines, “It’s quite inconvenient because my fellow …read more

Ever since Google released Google Analytics as a free tool it became the tool of choice for many site operators, and offered Google to add more data mining opportunities. MSN saw the opportunity and has been developing its own Analytics took offered as a direct competition to Google.
The project, titled Gatineau (for now), will be released in an Alpha 1 version by the end of summer and has some promising features which should make Google scared, very scared. According to a Microsoft engineer, “Beta 1 will include the ability to segment data by both age and gender buckets, so …read more

Google seems to have follow its users’ heart and added several features suggested by some of them. Along with the announcement of the new features they announced that Google Analytics is now legit and is no longer considered beta. Among the features added Google lists:

Hourly Reporting
Clickable URLs
Cross Segmentation by Network Location
Increased number of data rows per page
Bounce Rate increase/decrease
AdWords Integration

More features are listed in this knowledge base document.