Ok,

There is a lot of bashing, and sometimes I participate. However, Urchin 6 is absolutely-rediculously awesome. It tracks everything. Locations. Conversions. Where they went. What they did. When they left, almost down to why. I plan to completely change the way I use PPC, and to target local cities. Urchin 6 looks at Urchin 5 and asks "What are you doing here, little wuss?" .

Thanks, , for hooking us up with this fantastic software. It's WELL worth the money.

Maybe this should be on "Rants and Raves"

Awesome! Glad to hear it. Analytics is VITAL to seo, conversions and just in general improvement of any online business. Glad to hear Urchin 6 is so awesome.

And I guess it looks like its only $30 a month!! Thats a LOT more than the URchin 5, but really its pretty good for what Urchin 6 now has to offer.

Glad to hear its so cool!

Glad to hear you like it.
That is what we use for MC's site and I love it too!
Steph

I am still adjusting to Urchin 6, 2 quick questions:

1. Does it have a place where it shows robots activity?
2. From my brief encounter with the marketing campain, am I understanding it correctly that EVERY google and overture referral has to be tagged by using Urchin software?

Jayson,

Does it track keyword activity and where it came from?
How about the clickable paths -- is it as obvious as in Statcounter or still a guessing game as in Urchin 5?

I'm trying to determine if it does what Statcounter does as I really, truly like that software. I've learned more about my site in the past 4 days that I activated it then ever before.

Barbi,

Not my question, but the clickable paths aspect, from what i've figured out so far, could still be better. Otherwise, it's really cool.

On another front, I can't seen to get Urchin 6 grapics up here at work, only at home. This seriously limits my ability to use the tool where I SHOULD be using it, at work.

Anyone know why? Flash versions, maybe?

TIA

I put a ticket in for Urchin6 last evening and am patiently waiting for someone to flip the switch. I can't wait to see how the ppc management works. I've been looking for a third party tool to do this for a while. Most of them (the decent ones anyway) are far more expensive than $29 per month, so I am very curious.

Without looking too deeply into the problem and without having yet seen Urchin 6 myself... </caveat> the urchin graphics are displayed I believe using a software from Adobe called the SVG viewer. It may be that you might have to browse the Urchin help files on this and find the viewer and download it on the computer that is not loading the graphics. You may have done this on the computer at home and just don't remember. Let us know if that helps.

Found the answer:
http://help.urchin.com/index.cgi?&id=1406
- about half way down, this file talks a bit about it the viewer -
In order to activate this, there is a "show/hide (graph image)" link in the top right of the Urchin interface. At least, that's where it is on v5.x. One of these days, I'll have to get up to speed on v6. Try clicking that link first and if it shows the graphs, great! If not, it will have a link to download the viewer.

Barbiro,

Honestly the brief overview I had of Urchin 6 contained very little real traffic info to review, and I haven't yet activated it on any of our sites - so I'm not clear on how Urchin 6 tracks click-paths.

I'm perfectly happy with the StatsCounter features (especially click path tracking - just awesome) but I think many merchants will benefit from the conversion tracking that Urchin 6 promises. Big Picture kind of analytics Conversions rates and average $'s per conversion on PPC, and NSO keyterm traffic - stuff like that.

If Urchin can deliver both - Big picture analytics (conversions, averages etc) and detail analytics (actual click paths - from keyword/search engine to cart checkout) then its gotta be a winner.

If Urchin can't track the actual click paths, then having StatsCounter piggy back for that task could be a solution - I suppose.

Urchin and how Has Used It


http://urchin.com/resource_center/cs_monstercommerce.html

Case Studies - MonsterCommerce.com
Commerce uses A/B testing and Urchin 6 On Demand to focus their email campaigns

monstercommerce.com logo

MonsterCommerce, a leading provider of e-commerce software, planned to launch a new e-mail marketing campaign and needed to determine the most effective calls to action for specific audiences. Their plan was to compare ROI and conversion metrics for each group, using an A/B split testing approach.

An Urchin Beta site, MonsterCommerce had already been using Urchin 6 On Demand for several months to track activity on MonsterCommerce.com. Urchin had been providing valuable conversion and page view information on a per keyword basis. This marketing intelligence allowed MonsterCommerce to identify and eliminate three ineffective PPC campaigns, resulting in a savings of over $300 per day. The natural next step was to use Urchin 6 On Demand for the new e-mail marketing campaign.

For the email campaign, MonsterCommerce chose to focus on four different groups of customers: "Small Business Focused", "Ecommerce Focused", "Web Masters" and "Search Engine Marketers." Each group received the same ad containing the same three calls to action.

The referral links attached to each call of action, however, were tagged differently for each group. In addition, each call to action was uniquely tagged. For example, the referral link promoting the free trial in the newsletter sent to the Small Business group was tagged with a campaign name of "small business", "email" as the medium, a content tag of "free trial".

The unique tags enabled MonsterCommerce to obtain conversion data for each action item within each email. As a result, when the campaign ran, MonsterCommerce had conversion data for each group and each link within the ad copy sent to each group.

"The data really helped our marketing team refine this campaign the second time it ran," said Stephanie Leffler, CEO of MonsterCommerce. The conversion performance of each group varied widely. While one of the groups only resulted in a single sale, another group converted nearly 5 percent of all visitors that clicked on the free trial link. Leffler summarized the benefits, "As a result of the Urchin data, we were able to focus on the right groups and the right message and quadruple the effectiveness of this campaign".

MonsterCommerce is very pleased that this data was mined with very little effort. "From start to finish, it took us about 15 minutes to properly set up this campaign within Urchin and within our links, " said Chris Szymanski, Director of Brand Management at MonsterCommerce.

MonsterCommerce now relies on Urchin to track all performance metrics within the MonsterCommerce family of websites. In addition, MonsterCommerce provides the Urchin 5 software to their ecommerce customers for basic stats analysis.

Ms. Leffler believes that stats are essential to maximizing an ecommerce effort. "Great statistics and an effective ecommerce site go hand in hand. Without the data that Urchin 6 provides, webmasters are flying blind. Ecommerce is all about gauging successes and failures and responding quickly. Urchin gives us the ability to do that well."