Greetings all,

I have the site stats through Urchin. I am having difficulty following any of the paths taken by clients as well as most viewed pages.

Is this due to asp? I really would like some help on this. I do not wish to dismiss the program as useless due to my lack of comprehension.

Any help is appreciated.

Janet
www.rollingpaperwarehouse.com
your on-line RYO superstore

Yeah, it would appear that due to the ASP you can not easily see which 'products' are viewed the most or anything useful like that. Hopefully they'll be resolving this in 4.0. Dunno...

Supposedly they will be fixing this in 4.0, so tech support has informed me anyhow. Getting rid of asp will also allow the Googlebot to search your site with ease. I have been tracking Googlebot in my logs and they could not view any of my product pages. I just re-created all my product pages and set my own links. Take a look at http://www.narrowshoesnow.com and click a link on my Nav. bar. My links do not have '?' in them because i just cut an paste my products into frontpage then up-loaded my new product pages and gave them a new URL.

This is an excellent idea... and your hard work will pay off. The 4.0 site Map generator will help faciliate the .asp pages being spidered...

After a discussion with the very helpful tech support, the product ranking can be determined (within reason) by the number of views per gif or jpg. I have found this to be more helpful.

Urchin cannot track pages that query a database. Since that is the nature of .asp, it cannot track the full address of this. This is not due to the software of MC, but more to the software of Urchin. Urchin does have a newer release coming out sometime (I have no idea when), and I hope it resolves this issue. But the ability of Urchin to track .asp pages is not related to our software, and the new version will still use .asp, as it is the best way to go!



p.s. Ptalk, that is an excellent idea, but it does take a lot of work to complete (especially if you have a lot of products). It does definitely help you out with Urchin though.

I currently tossed Site Meter into my footer so I can "see" what products people are looking at. Since we use ASP it won't actually list the product name but it will display the link. I can just click on it and see what the product was. This is very useful to find out the top 10 or 20 products being viewed.

I can also use it to see who's "currently" on my site and what they're doing. (ie. using search, looking at a product, catagory, etc.)

Okay, I've contacted 's customer support and I've read through a lot of the Urchin documentation they have on line. Not slamming 's support team here, they do a great job with all my stupid user questions. I'm just opening up the thread a little.

Unless I'm reading everything wrong, the Urchin site stats should be able to apply a "DynamicURL" filter to the log files/reports. Supported in Urchin 4.0 and above.

Can someone please take look at what Urchin is saying and see if they agree?

This should be the URL:
http://help.urchin.com/index.cgi?version=4...category=408010

If it doesn't work, just go to the help center and search for DynamicURL.

It's been my experiecnce that most of the web reporting packages can support dynamic URL's, but they must be configured properly at the point of importing the log files. Which means would need to do this work since the admin controls of the stats package are not open to the users.

Are we not using Urchin 4? At least that's what it says on my stats screen.

Just something the think about. Comments welcome.

There are already two posts that address this issue. I have copied a portion of the explanation below. If you wanted to see the entire explanation on stats, look at the forums for "Urchin delayed stats" and "No activity? 0 visitors?" They will both have the entire explanation. The part that deals with the database query is as follows:

One of the primary issues is that customers want to have access to tracking of variables in their web site URLs such as http://www.monstercommercedemo.com/product.asp?3=146, so that an accurate gauge of how popular some products are, or the progression of browsing from the customer, etc, etc. Unfortunately, this is just not something that our standard stats offering will be able o provide for several reasons. The first of these reasons being that the added overhead processing the URI stems for parameters of page requests causes to the overall performance of the stats server is so high that it literally adds almost exponentially to the total processing time of all sites. This ability does exist, and it has actually led to some serious delays in stats processing, which in turn makes other customers unhappy (especially those who don't seem to need more information than is already present). We are currently in the process of removing these filters to parse URI stems for the sites we enabled it on to improve overall performance. The second main reason we do not process log information to this granular a level is that configuring the filters of regular expressions it takes to catch and isolate the particular parameter or variable that our customers want is a manual process and would have to be continually modified and/or tweaked to catch exactly what information each customer wanted. Aside from the amount of time and effort this takes, it is literally something we would have to update or change every time a customer's product line was modified in any way.