Urchin 5.5 - Web Analytics Product Review

The depth of a users session can also provide meaningful insight into your Web site's navigation and design. With a Weblog, you will not see a deep click path. However, in regard to "rich content and product" sites, you will want to see a user go deep into your site. All usability and conversion specialists recommend to keep the click count (the number of clicks required to make a purchase) down to a minimum, many say 3 clicks is a good number. This report enables you to gauge this metric and make adjustments to your site to increase conversion rates and the usability of your Web site.

In addition to the depth of a session, Urchin gives you the ability to track the length of time per session that they are staying on your site. Depending on the site's purpose you will want the numbers to be higher or lower. This report gives you the answers you need to make informed decisions about your site's and page's layout and architecture.

That covers the navigation section of the basic Urchin module. Navigation patterns and behavior is a critical metric that must be measured for every serious Web site. If you are not currently measuring these metrics then you are walking in the dark. As mentioned above, I will be discussing the Campaign Tracking Module (CTM), which expands on many of these concepts.

Referrals, is the next major reporting section in the Urchin module. Referrals are a search engine optimizers dream statistic. Urchin does an excellent job summarizing and reporting on all types of referrals from direct hits, search engine driven traffic, directory driven traffic, and other referral driven traffic.

The screen shot displays the referrals ordered by most frequent. This is an easy way to see how the majority of your visitors are getting to your site. Some sites get all of their traffic from one place, whereas others get their traffic from many places. It is important to track referrals to see where traffic is coming from and where it is not coming from. Then you will be able to adjust your linking campaigns accordingly.

The next report, named "Referral Drilldown", groups the referrals by domain name. This is helpful to summarize which Web sites bring you the most traffic as a whole. This report differs from the report just mentioned above. The report above lists the pages that refer traffic to your site as compared to this report that lists the sites that refer traffic to your site. Pages are defined as individual html documents within a site, whereas a site contains multiple pages.

The next report named "Search Terms" report provides data on what keywords people are entering in to the search engines to find your site. This report is not grouped or filtered by a specific search engine. It is just a quick and easy way to see which search terms bring in traffic to your site. It is important to track this information in order to be able to change your keyword strategy for better quality keywords. Quality keywords are essential in order to bring relevant traffic to your site. If your keywords are unrelated to the service/product that your business offers then you are just wasting money on your monthly bandwidth bill.

The "Search Engine" report gives you a break down according to search engine. Firstly, it tells you which engines bring you the most traffic. Secondly, by clicking on the arrow for more information, it tells you which keywords are bringing in traffic for that specific engine. It is important to see which engines are driving traffic to your site. Based on what market share those search engines currently have, your traffic should be somewhat the same. If they are greatly skewed then you know your keyword optimization for certain engines are poor. For example, let us say Google has 30% market share, Yahoo! has 40% market share, and AskJeeves has 10% market share. It would be nice to see that 30% of your search engine driven traffic comes from Google, 40% from Yahoo! and 10% from AskJeeves. If the percentages look more like 40%, 40% and 1% then you know something is wrong. You will need to look at Teoma's engine (AskJeeves is powered by Teoma) and see what you can do to improve your rankings. AskJeeves also has more paid listings on a page then most search engines, so that is a factor as well. Yahoo! plans on switching its organic results from Google to Inktomi within the next month or two, will your site do well with the Inktomi engine powering Yahoo!? This is all-important information that can be derived from this report and other reports in Urchin.

That wraps up one of the most interesting sections of the Urchin reporting tool, referrals. Referrals detail how people are getting to your site, what keywords they query the search engines with, and which engines drive the most traffic to your site.

The next section discusses the domains and users, a section I personally do not spend much time analyzing. The domains report gives you the ability to track, which ISPs are providing the traffic to your site. Basically, this report tells you how many people are using AOL or another Internet Service Provider (ISP) as their Internet connection to visit your site. This does come in handy if you want to build a site that requires high-speed connections, which requires your user to have a high-speed ISP.

The "Countries" report details what geographic location your user is coming from. This statistics is very useful for large International sites and content sites. One major reason why one would track this information is to know if they should possibly offer the content on their site in multiple languages. If most of your traffic comes from the United States, then you should update your site's content based on that countries traffic patterns. In addition, your content should be United States focused and appeal to that cultural group.

The next report is named "IP Addresses." It gives you a break down of the most frequent sessions by IP address. Further more you can click on the IP address and Urchin will do a reverse lookup on the IP address to give you more information on that user. So when you find out your "friendly competitor" has been chewing up all your bandwidth by creating a robot that downloads all your product graphics, you can send that competitor a note or simply ban that IP address.

That sums up the "Domains and Users" section of the Urchin reporting module. The "Domains and Users" section allows you to track the ISPs and Countries that visit your site. In addition you can drill down into a users IP address and conduct a reverse IP lookup. One thing I did not cover was the username reporting, which is a simple report of the length and time a user logged into your Web site.

Another useful section of the reporting module is the "Browsers and Robots" section. This section gives you information on the type of browsers and computers your visitors are using to visit your site. In addition this section also gives you information about the different robots visiting your site. This report is named Browsers and it tells you which browser the visitors are using. From Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera and the new Apple browser Safari. Web sites work differently on different browsers. It is therefore important to make your Web pages compatible with most of the available browsers. Which browsers, will depend on what you see in this report. Urchin also gives you the ability to drill down into a browser to see which version of that browser people are using. As most of you know, Web pages also work differently with the same browser but a different version.

The "Platforms" report provides information on the type of operating system the person is using to visit your site. This report drills down into the version of the operating system as well. And yes, Web pages work differently on different operating systems.

A fun and useful report for search engine optimizers is this "Robots" report. It summarizes which "robots" or "spiders" visit your site. SEO's use this report to ensure that the engines are visiting your site. If any robots are missing then you know you need to get them to visit your site some way and some how. In addition you can see which bots are most active. This report does not go into detail of which pages of your site the robots visited. There are plenty of free tools out on the Internet that can provide this detail, one is SpyderTrax by the founder of SEO Chat and can be downloaded at http://www.darrinward.com/.

That concludes the "Browsers and Robots" section of the Urchin Reporting Module. The next section is the last module included in the base Urchin license and it is called the "Client Parameters" report. The Client Parameters report requires that you place the UTM code on each of the page headers of your site. This allows Urchin to report on such attributes as screen resolution, screen colors, languages, Java, Time zones and JavaScript version information.

The first report you see below is the screen resolution report. How often do you ask yourself, if I was to do a redesign what size screen should the layout conform to? Most people just go with the standard 800X600 resolution. Yet, with this tool you are able to be able to be more creative.

The "Screen Colors" report is a nifty report that tells you whether your visitors have a 1 bit to 32 bit screen color settings. The languages report details the browser and computer language set by your Web site visitors, which helps you answer the question, should I make my content available in other languages? The Java Enabled report tells you the percentage of visitors that have Java enabled. The time zone report gives you information as to the visitor's time zone settings and the JavaScript report tells you the JavaScript version information.

That covers all the reporting available within the base Urchin license. It is powerful, easy to use and extremely useful information. The next reporting section discusses the new Urchin Campaign Tracking Module (CTM). I have not yet used all the features within this module but the CTM can be an incredible asset for any Web business looking to increase conversion rates through the use of metrics. The CTM is powerful enough to breakdown by sub campaign how well you are doing in dollars and in goal conversions. So if you do an email campaign you can track how well the different links in the email campaign convert. In addition you can track organic and paid search engine traffic and so much more.