Measuring Success

Google Analytics has come along way since the acquisition of Urchin was announced in April 2005. In this article I wanted to summarise the achievements made to date and discuss my view as the future for the product.

A brief history of Urchin
Urchin analytics has been around for some time. In fact since 1997, Urchin [...]

When viewing Google Analytics reports, I constantly need to remind myself of the difference between goals and conversions (may be its just me that gets confused..!). Whatever, I thought I would share my clarification.

Keeping a local copy of your Google Analytics data can be very useful for your organisation. For example, Google currently commits to keeping Google Analytics data for 25 months allowing you to compare year on year reports. That is adequate for most users, but what if you wish to go further back? Wouldn’t it be [...]

Urchin is the software company and technology that Google acquired in April 2005 that went on to become Google Analytics. Urchin software remains a product in its own right and is a downloadable software tool that runs on a local server (Unix and Windows) providing web analytics reports by processing web server logfiles – [...]

My colleague Avinash recently presented at SES San Jose his thoughts on the current vendor space including: Visual Sciences, Omniture, IndexTools, Clicktracks, WebTrends and Google Analytics. As always, his talks are very engaging and thought provoking. For me though, one slide really stood out – the idea that a HYBRID web analytics tool can’t hunt [...]

Its actually quite easy to detect which web analytics tool a web site is using – you can simply view the source code and look for the page tags yourself. Of course pure logfile analysers cannot be detected in this way, but those are now much less common due to their inherent limitations.
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