Comments on: What is Urchin 6?

By: Brian Clifton

Brian Clifton — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:23:20 +0000

Sean: Thanks for the great insight. Now that you are allowed to set first party cookies I would recommend setting up Urchin with the UTM method i.e. hybrid (logfile + cookies). Logfiles on their own are incredibly inaccurate. The accuracy whitepaper has more details on this.

If you are in two minds of GA versus Urchin, you can always use both side by side: http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/2007/10/17/backup-your-ga-data-locally/

Updated 01-Mar-2010
Sean is referring to the following announcement:
From @brianclifton: Big news for the world of Google Analytics: GA Officially deemed Secure Enough to Get US Federal Government Approval http://bit.ly/cgrnrj

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:11:10 +0000

I work for a US Government office, and we had to look for a solution that would be hosted in-house and didn’t use cookies. Urchin is what we settled on, primarily because of its huge bang for the buck.

That said, after a year and a half of use, I have to say I haven’t regretted the decision. One of the biggest benefits of Urchin is to be able to process reports on-demand, for as far back as we have log files.

For instance, just recently we ran in to our site being slammed by traffic from Google Images. While I am normally very against filtering traffic, the volume was such that it was making any sort of analysis of the targeted audience for the site impossible.

This had started a month before anyone really realized what was going on. With Google Analytics, I could have put on a filter, but I would be stuck with that month being out of whack.

With Urchin, I was able to put on a highly specific filter (all traffic from Google Images that have “tsunami” in the URI) and reprocess that month. Report corrected not just from this point on, but from before the problem started.

That is the first time it has happened, but it was great to know that I could fix my reports with 30 minutes of work, instead of having to tell my colleagues that they were just going to have to live with that month.

The major drawbacks of Urchin were that the interface was ugly and unfriendly, and important information was scattered in a handful of different pages within a report.

But now, with them opening up an API for Urchin and a little coding on my end, I can give my coworkers a more attractive interface with all of the information in one place.

So for us, Urchin is really the perfect solution to web stats. Even if my bosses came to me today and told me we could start using Google Analytics, I would tell them we don’t need to.

By: Brian Clifton

Brian Clifton — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:56:04 +0000

intranet software: I wouldn’t describe it as easy or hard – just different…

By: intranet software

intranet software — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:40:41 +0000

Some webmaster integrate Google Analytics into their own management console that they coded themselves. Is this harder to do with Urchin?

By: Brian Clifton

Brian Clifton — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:37:19 +0000

RM/GAC: You need to contact an Urchin Software Authorised Consultant (USAC). List is at: http://www.google.com/urchin/usac.html

If you wish to use my company, we are listed as GA-Experts.com