ONLINE EVENT: Anyone using Urchin out there?

Here at TechSoup we have been using Urchin but then Google bought them. Now, they have finally come out with the next version of Urchin that uses some functionality of Google Analytics.

What is Urchin

If you are using Urchin would you consider upgrading to 6.0?

Hi, Malin,

I work with Urchin 5.0. That is the tool that is installed by our web host. It is a log file based tool.

We are interested in upgrading to 6.0. It will include the ability to do Java-Script tagging to collect actual hits as opposed to a blanket hit counter like it currently has.

So we will see when it comes out and go from there.

I also wanted to make a comment about using Urchin. There is a lot of information available through Urchin. If you are new or mostly new to working with web analytic tools it can be pretty overwhelming. There have been some great resources offered here to learn more about web metrics. In addition, I'd like to add that you can also just find some parts of the information that make sense to you and start there.

One thing that I found pretty intuitive was 'most viewed pages.' Working with that helped me to slowly understand how to use Urchin.

'Entrance page' was also something that helped me to get comfortable with using Urchin. I was able to see that some of our pages were acting as de facto 'home pages.' By that I mean that a lot of people were consistently entering through certain resource pages. I made some changes to those pages to reflect that these were a kind of informal 'front door'.

Best wishes,

What I really like about Urchin is that it is Web based. It made it really easy to pull information up quickly for a set time period.

I have used it mostly for identifying the most popular articles and forums threads. It also has good information about operating systems and web browsers.

This also brings up an important point with Web analytics tools. I think it is really important to use more than one tool. It will allow you to double check the information from each tools. Since you are using two different tools, you have to be aware that they will count the information differently but it will tell you if one tool is off the mark.

I'm really excited about Urchin 6.0. It will be interesting to see if Urchin becomes Google's pay toll to augment its free Web analytics tool.

This also brings up an important point with Web analytics tools. I think it is really important to use more than one tool. It will allow you to double check the information from each tools. Since you are using two different tools, you have to be aware that they will count the information differently but it will tell you if one tool is off the mark.

This is an excellent point Malin -- using more than tool -- and it's something I've raised myself in another post.

I agree that using 2 tools can be a great way to "audit" the accuracy of the data. If you're using a JavaScript page-tagging solution, consider complimenting that with a log file tool such as AWStats.

You should expect to find that the numbers don't match exactly across all tools, up to a certain point. If the discrepancy between both tools is high, this should tell you there's a problem somewhere with the way you've set up your data collection -- maybe you haven't configured the tool properly, etc.

Yann