Microsoft has been testing their new free analytics program for a while and a new round of invites has recently gone out to those wishing to try out analytics.

A few important troubleshooting tips if you have an invite:

• You may have to visit the page a few times before the signup process runs smoothly. It looks like the initial errors where the pages were erroring out have been fixed.
• Ensure the email address of the invite is the exact same as the email address in your adCenter account
• Once you have the code and place it on your site, you have to wait for statistics to accrue before you can add advanced options such as:
  • Goal setting
  • Outbound link tracking
  • Event tracking
• Be patent. While trying to write this post, the system has been unavailable about half of the time I’ve clicked on a link within the analytics interface.

The most interesting feature is the ability to segment your analytics by age, gender, occupation, and geography. This is most likely associating website visits to passport accounts and other Microsoft data which is similar to how adCenter’s targeting works.

While Microsoft doesn’t know everyone’s information, and the ‘unknown’ category is by far the largest, the additional data can be quite useful for slicing and dicing data.

Screenshot of segmentation by Age. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Gender. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Occupation. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Geography. (click image for full view)

While the interface is still a bit basic and erratic, the above segmentation data is not available in any other free analytics service that I’m aware of.

Using Microsoft adCenter Analytics combined with Microsoft adLabs can give you some powerful analytics to help engage your audience in new and meaningful ways.

• links for 2007-08-28
• Microsoft to Offer Free Analytics
• links for 2007-09-19
• Tracking AdSense with Google Analytics
• Understanding IP Targeting for PPC Campaigns