Hi,

I like the Urchin statistics in general. They give me a sense of how my site is doing. But in some areas the statistics are not telling me what I need to know. So let me list some of the <perhaps> advanced things I would like to know from about my statistics.

If anyone knows how to accomplish any of this with the existing stats please let me know. Otherwise consider this a wishlist of how the statistics program needs to be enhanced.

Anyone - please feel free to add to this list:

1. I read lots of advice like... "Check if yahoo spiders your robots.txt then leaves..." How can I do this?

2. Most of my sales are call in, so getting a sense of ROI is a struggle. However, if I had statistics like these it could help me tremendously:
- length of session by engine / keyword
- depth of session by engine / keyword

3. I need a way to see my PPC traffic vs. my Organic traffic. When I create a campaign in Adwords or Overture, I use tracking urls like /source=Overture. But that doesn't seem to help me. I get totals for Google for example, but I can't tell how much of that traffic is from Adwords.

4. I'd like to see average load times per page. That way if I have any particularity large / slow pages I'll be able to spot the problem. I work on high speed networks all of the time so I can't tell which pages are particularily bad for those poor schmucks using dialup.

Thanks.

If you would like to track PPC or advertising campaigns I would suggest highly that you look into http://www.eztrackz.com it is very cheap as far as cost but very good as far as being able to track everything right down to the invoice number of the sales for each keyword or ezine or ad you want to track.

Just my 3 cents.....

Thanks for your response Neil82591.

I was wondering though, as far as #1 "Check if yahoo spiders your robots.txt then leaves...". As far as I can see, the only way to do this would be looking at the actual logs.

Would the stats program you mentioned, http://www.eztrackz.com, help do this?

And I guess my other question is to :

Is it your intention to provide high quality statistics or just basic quality (like now).

If I want high quality stats should I be looking somewhere else for it (I'm talking about stats only here, not shopping cart, etc,).

I am not with Commerce I am a merchant like you that uses them....... For tracking PPC or any campaign I would use Eztrackz but for basic stats Urchin is fine I guess....... You can make a request in a trouble ticket to get the raw logs I believe.

Just my 3 cents..........

Hi cctvgirl -

Our goal currently is to provide a basic, general purpose, stats program that is cost effective for all merchants but still provides a good amount of data. From what we have found, Urchin currently has the best price to features ratio that works for our clients.

You are absolutely right in that there is a lot more information that could be obtained. However, that would slow down processing, and in the shared environment, this would cause stats to be behind for days or weeks even.

If you need more robust statistics, I would recommend first looking at WebTrends Live. They are a very reputable company that is well known in the industry. They will definitely be more expensive, but if that sort of information is important to you, then you will have what you need.

Others may be able to recommend different stat programs, and I would be interested to see what is suggested. I have tried a handful of free stats programs, none of which provide nearly the info that Urchin does.

Thank you for the feedback, guys.

Anytime.........

All -
Is anyone using WebTrends Live or ClickTrackz Analyzer? I assume MC would integrate either? Urchin is pretty good and EZtrackz is good for campaigns (as long as you use a tracking url), but I really need to measure referrals for all orders (ex. from organic search). Does anyone have any other suggestions or methods for measuring referral info for all orders?

Thanks...

Bill

As far as the yahoo or google robot indexing your site...I thought you could get an indication on this by going to Browsers and Robots and then clicking on Robots. If you use the number of Robots by Hits report...and click on the little graph tool to the right of the robot (say googlebot or yahooseeker), it tells you what the activitiy for that robot is on your site each day. When I do this, I see that Google comes each day but only accesses about 100 to 400 bytes and then once a week it seems to spend more time....acessing over 10,000 bytes on a particular day, usually Wed or Friday.

Can we use this as an indicator as to how often the search engines are indexing us?

I just joined Urchins recently and am very confused as to what I'm seeing. I was looking in the robots by hits drilldown section and it says that
googlebot.image hit my site 3,488 times. Does anyone know what "googlebot.image is? Does it just search the images only on my site?

Thanks!
Patti

Hi Purple kitty,

Thanks, that's what I thought. I'm just not clear on why it would just look for the images. Do you think this will be beneficial to me?

Patti

Just a thought...
Prior to , I hosted with Verio.
The site stats I had there offered a real time look...I could log in and see who was on my site at that very moment. Is there a way that Urchin (and I do like Urchin), could offer that??? I'm sure that I'm not alone in thinking that this would be very beneficial...and it was not costly at all.

Yes.. that feature, being able to see who was on at the moment was very benefitial. I loved looking at it and seeing that x amount of people were at my site. Hopefully urchin can do that. any way of getting that feature, ?