Microsoft adCenter Analytics – Finally In!

Well,
It only took two days and dozens of failed logins, error messages, appology emails and so on – but I’m finally in – and I am now the proud owner of 2 Microsoft Analytics profiles 🙂

So, I just wanted to share the first experience of setting up a profile and going over the different features and settings – mainly because I just started to collect data andthere’s nothing to actually see in the reports.

The overall UI is quite good. It has the same look and feel of Microsoft Adcenter, and similar hierarchy and navigation, whic are very smart as they shorten the learning curve. The interface is AJAX rich and runs quite fastly.

Going over the signup process, there was a very cute feature which offered to automatically install the tracking codes to my web site – amazingly I agreed to let it log to my FTP server and do what it should – but as expected, this failed. Actually, the only page that had the Adcenter code after I run their wizard was the default wordpress readme.html file 😉 which hardly counts for a page, and the good thing I got from this was to delete it from the server. It is quite obvious to say that the software gently ignored the worpress files and filders which are ending with the fantastic .php extention – and I’m intreagued whether this is because they really don’t follow anything other than .HTML or intentionally?

Well, I logged to my control panel of word[press and pasted the codes myself where they should be. One of the funny things I have yet to understand – is that the user account authentication code consists of only 4 capital letters (you can see in my source code of this page), and the next profile as well as one another friend of mine just entered – were pretty much following. I wonder how they authenticate the web sites…?

Going over the profile settings, there are very clear options, and when entering each option I found the logic to be very straight forward, simple, easy to use andunderstand. The con here is that it seems much less sophiosticated than Google’s filtering system as well as other tools. All in all, I get the feeling that this is more targeted towards newbies and small businesses than larger more complex web sites. here’s how it looks like:

In the coming days, I’ll update a bit deeper on the actual reprots and data!
*cheers*
Ophir