Welcome, Bing!

MSN has converted itself into Bing.com.  Now all web analytics packages are momentarily obsolete – until the next upgrade, code release, or until you take matters into your own hands and update the product you use.

First, let’s see how Bing identifies itself as a referring site in your logfiles:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=querystring_here&FORM=MSNH11

Nothing too fancy here.   The fully specified domain name and query string value is here. I’m not yet too sure about the ‘FORM=MSNH11’ value – I am sure it is a useful item yet to be discovered.

Google Analytics
I know that Google Analytics (GA) will allow users to add new search engines with a special API call that you need to add after the first pageTracker() call:

pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com","q");

What is not clear is if this call should be made only once, or if it should remain part of your tagging at least until GA reports Bing data on its own. More on this later.  Somehow I suspect Google will be a bit lackadasical about adding a competing search engine to is reports.

Omniture
SiteCatalyst appears to report on Bing referrals just fine. It nicely displays as ‘Microsoft Bing’ instead of just ‘Bing’. This will help SiteCatalyst users make the transition visually.

Webtrends
The WebtrendsOutsider blog has documented how to update self-hosted Webtrends installations to report Bing data properly. For users running a custom keywords.ini file, this post explains how to make the update.  For users running the ‘factory’ keywords.ini and browser.ini files, just hop over to Webtrends and pick up new versioned copies of both files and place them on your WT server.