Urchin

[ShaneM]

any of you guys use Urchin. I am planning to use it on my new site. It sounds great on paper with the ecomm plug in it will even track my roi for specific keywords from specific referers (overture). Seems good to me, any experiances?

[Mardi_Gras]

I use the version Earthlink provides (V 3.0). Like most tracking software, AOL users wreak havoc with it. Let's say you get 10 visitors who visit five pages each. Five of these 10 are from AOL, which serves up a new IP address with every page request. Your Urchin logs (and most logs) will show that you had not 10, but 30 unique visitors. It will also show that instead of an average of five page views per visitor, you had an average of 1.6 page views per visitor. Is this useful to you? It isn't to me.

I have to say that these are not inherently Urchin problems - they are problems with any non-cookie based tracking system.

I know the problem. I just don't know the solution. But I'm working on it. I know others here are way ahead of me on this.

[seth_wilde]

I love urchin :) Best stats I've used...

"AOL"

You need to talk Earthlink into upgrading :) v4 now uses a first person cookie to take care of this problem.

[urchin.com...]

[Mardi_Gras]

Seth delivers the solution to my problem :)

[rcjordan]

urchin always gets good testimonials (...especially from seth).

As I recall, it won't do multi-domain, right?

[Mardi_Gras]

I need an easy way to see not just who comes to my site, but where my buyers come from.

Without sounding like a broken a record over my last few posts, I think an effective tracking system requires cookies, PHP, and MySQL. Referrers could be tracked when the cookie is issued, then that information could be recalled when a purchase (or some other desired action) is completed.

Unfortunately, my web coder is just learning PHP and Earthlink doesn't support it. So I need to change hosts and wait for my coder to catch up.

[seth_wilde]

"multi-domain"

Not sure what you mean.. have an example?

"where my buyers come from"

You might want to check into buying affiliate tracking software and then just having your programmer make the necessary mods. We were able to find a .cfm system for less than $300 that gave us the source code and a license for all sites on our server...

[ShaneM]

actually i belive urchin has a multi domain package for ther service. check there site.