Urchin Reports

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drewpropsdrewprops
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
I have a few questions and comments for all of you who own or maintain websites which provide Urchin-brand web stats.



1. Don't you wish that there was a way to save your viewing preferences so that you didn't have to spent two minutes resetting the views every time you go in to read the stats?



2. Do any of you maintain multiple sites? I've found that some of my sites can check the previous day's statistics, whereas one of my sites can only ever see two days back. One is the "advanced" version and one is version "3.3".



3. How difficult would it be to provide even more accurate data in these reports, for example, that a visitor from "xyz.com" visited "13" pages, and provide you with which pages they visited. What's the overhead on such data?



I know that there are other stat packages out there, but I really want to discuss Urchin Reports. Who else uses Urchin and what kind of issues do you have with their service, and are there any updates on the horizon?



I think I may email them to find out what's next for them.



D

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    drewpropsdrewprops Posts: 2,321member
    And by overwhelming response you've told me that NOBODY uses the Urchin Reports to view stats of your websites....of course, it could just be that I asked the question over the weekend when nobody was around.



    Yeah, maybe that's it.



    D
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  • Reply 2 of 2
    the pie manthe pie man Posts: 425member
    I checked out Urchin and was pretty impressed with what I saw. UI is nice - stats seem a bit slim in some respects, but it is super easy to navigate and get to stuff so that almost makes up for it... Then I checked out the price tag. So I kept looking.



    Also it looks like they use a web bug to track internal paths through the site (and referring info too?) which I don't like just on general principles (plus that means I have to put that bug in all my sites and I am not going to do that just on general principles ).



    I am currently using SawMill. I am moderately happy with it - price is right - tons of info - customizable up the wazoo - very unwieldy - too easy to corrupt the internal database of info and have to rebuild from log sources - but the developer is fantastic. I even got over $140 by finding some bugs in the software (any bug you find gets you $20). I felt so good about him and the product I never cashed it in....



    I am not positive about Urchin, but I would expect that in some respects all stats programs are similar. They build a database of information using the log files - so you can then track info the way you are talking. In Sawmill you have options when setting up the stats how detailed you want to track your info. So for instance you can set it up to do what you want to do - don't know the correct terms, but you can set up correlations between types of data - referrer to pages for instance... only issue is the more detailed you make the tracking of stats, the more the database size grows - it seems to grow almost exponentially (I also use words like gazillions a lot, so take that with a grain of salt). But it isn't pretty.



    I would imagine if you are using a host's stats package they turn down the options so their hdds don't get overloaded with stats no one uses. (I know Verio uses Urchin 3.3 - Verio sucks @$$ btw - don't use them)



    I used to use Communitech.net for hosting - loved em actually. They use WebTrends which is by far the best package I have seen - costs thousands of dollars so when I started hosting myself it was out of the question. Default unix virtual server gets you 500MB of space. That ended up being eaten up by the WebTrends database after a while - I never could figure out how I kept running into my MB ceiling until I checked the WebTrends directory... It was all in there.



    Long post - no real help... Must be late
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