Measuring Success

There are two Google products for web analytics – Urchin Software and Google Analytics. Which one should you choose? This article describes what criteria to use for deciding between the two and is a follow up to my recent article “What is Urchin 6“. As a general guide, Marketers prefer Google Analytics, IT departments prefer Urchin… This statement is reflected in the user-base for each product. Urchin is mainly used for measuring intranets (an area of the business that Marketing is not involved in), and used by web-hosting providers where deployment scalability for a large number of websites is important. On the other hand, Google Analytics, apart from being a free service (Urchin requires a purchased license), is used by organizations that wish to have greater control of their individual web analytics implementation. Those are not mutually exclusive rules or requirements, so lets look at some criteria. When GA is [...]

I often receive questions about Urchin – what it is (typically: Is it the commercial version of GA?) how it compares with Google Analytics, and how to choose between the two. This post, an abstract from the latest version of the book, explains what Urchin is, its relationship to Google Analytics and why, if at all, you need to consider it. Urchin Software Inc. is the company and technology that Google acquired in April 2005 and went on to become Google Analytics—a free web analytics service that uses the resources at Google (I explain more about its history in Google Analytics – Fours Years on). Urchin software is a downloadable web analytics program that runs on a local server (Unix or Windows). Typically, this is the same machine as your web server. The Urchin Software creates reports by processing your web server logfiles (including hybrid logfiles) and is commonly referred [...]

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 software has been slowly and quietly building a strong reputation for its server-side web analytics software. I first came across it in 2003, where its lightening fast processing power, small resource footprint and good value for money caught my attention. Even on a moderately specified Linux box, Urchin’s number crunching performance far exceeded anything else on the market – and still does today. This has made it particularly attractive to ISPs and web hosting companies that remain its largest customer base. A differentiator for the Urchin product is its hybrid approach – combining data [...]

Keeping a local copy of your Google Analytics data can be very useful for your organisation. For example, for third party data audits, reprocessing data, troubleshooting purposes, and for viewing data longer than 25 months (Google’s current data retention commitment). Having a local copy of the collected data allows you achieve all these and protects you from the accidental or malicious deletion of your GA account and profiles. If you are looking for an outsourced backup service for Google Analytics, contact GA-Experts.com, who can do this all for you… [This post updated: 04-Aug-2009] Benefits of keeping a local copy of Google Analytics visitor data What you can do with your local copy of your data: Greater control over your data e.g. for third-party audits Troubleshoot Google Analytics implementation issues Process historical data as far back as you wish – using Urchin Re-process data when you wish – using Urchin Use [...]

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 – including HYBRID logfiles – which are the most accurate.

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 – you need to view his presentation to follow that, but essentially the analogy is that HYBRIDs are not good as a web analytics tool. As Avinash knows, I disagree with this point of view, so I wanted to explain why here. By HYBRID tool, what is generally meant is the combination of the page tagging technique combined with logfile data to produce cookie fortified logfiles. This was discussed in a white paper before I joined Google – Web Analytics Data Sources . There are significant advantages to doing this as shown in the diagram [...]