Urchin 5.5 - Web Analytics Product Review

Installing Urchin is really easy. It took me no time to install their free 15-day demo. After installing the software on my server, I logged in and set up my clients with access to their Web statistics. The screen you see below is the "Preferences" screen that allows me to change my password and more.

After setting up my preferences I was able to configure the settings for the domain seroundtable.com. I clicked on "Edit" on the "Configuration, Profiles" page.

Urchin allows you to configure each report with different options. For example, seroundtable.com has no e-commerce functions, so I easily removed those reporting features from the reports by selecting the "Campaign Website" profile type. Some of my customers have different profile types because they either don't have e-commerce or campaign tracking or both. This GUI (Graphical User Interface) makes it easy to manage all your reports in one area.

Each report is individually configurable by the "Super Administrator." Below you will see the screen that gives me the ability to modify criteria such as the number of levels in a users path stream that Urchin will track (by default this number is set to 3). All the way at the bottom you will see an option for "Primary Goal Match". With Urchin's Campaign Tracking Module, you are able to specify one or many goals for your site and track response rates to those goals. With seroundtable.com, the only goal I set up was if a visitor added a comment or not. The page to add a comment (at the time of writing this article) was seroundtable.com/mt-comments.cgi. Each time a user went to that URL, Urchin marked that there was successful goal completion. Repeat visitors were tracked and recorded as well.

For many reasons, it is important to have the ability to add filters to the log files reporting. Urchin makes this easy. You simply go to the report profile that you would like to set up a filter for, and click on the "Profile Filters" tab. Urchin has pre-defined filters that you can choose from or you can make your own custom filter with the filter wizard. This comes in handy when you want to make two reports for the same domain.

In addition, it is really easy to give multiple people access to one or more reports. With the use of the User Wizard, Urchin gives you the ability to quickly add users so that they can access their reports. As you can see below, you simply select which users are part of which group and then specify which groups have what access to specific reports. Urchin provides a very easy and logical method of setting up user and group access to reports.

Within the configuration section of the module, you can easily specify how often you would like to run each report. For seroundtable.com, I have selected a schedule that runs the update of the reports every hour, 45 minutes past the hour. Urchin can process huge log files in exceptionally quickly. Older versions of Urchin used to take significantly longer but with Urchin 5.5, running a report takes seconds.

That covers the first part of the detailed Urchin review - the set up and configuration component. More information on installing and configuring Urchin to your liking is available at Urchin's Web site and via the Urchin customer service line. The next section will discuss in detail the available reporting features.