Sorry guys but these stats through Urchin just don't cut it. We really can't track details from traffic coming-in. No matter how you slice it or dice it, information becomes too diluted to really know what is going on. I.E. Are these people all coming from U.S. or other countries, their IP addresses etc.

Knowing where these people are coming from can tell us if a certain marketing program is bringing us the targeted traffic we expected or just just partner sites overseas that we dont care about.

Knowing IP addresses helps us determine if a competitor of ours is sabotaging us through PPC programs such as Overture, Google etc. Believe me Overture does not care neither does Google and their so called protection mechanism are nowhere to be seen. We've used our own tracking tools and found competitors IP addresses schemes repeating and repeating.

It cost way too much in PPC to ignore such details. Our ROI is a top priority and when we know for a fact that Urching does very little to help us track these, it becomes very discouring.

Are there other tools that have been looked at that offer better detail? We don't mind paying more if we are getting more.

Thanks.

You know I sometimes think it should be Google and Overtures responsibilities to show us the IP addresses of the click thrus.

They are charging us for them and supposely stopping mass clickers, so I think it is there responsibility to prove to us that each of the click we are paying for is a legitimate one and where it is coming from.

Just my wishful thinking.

I agree but I would like to see more stats on what actual pages my visitors go too. All I see is that my visitors go to product.asp . but I want to know what product.

I have another site using Earthlinks hosting services with Urchin and they go track Country. Was there a specific list that had to choose from to set up the stats. If so maybe we could have a say in what gets reported

Hey Guys,

Follow this thread http://www.monstercommerceforum.com/index....&st=0&#entry497 It might answer some of your questions, Maybe!

Calvino,

Try www.webtrendslive.com. You will pay more and you will get more. If you want advanced stats you should not be using Urchin. Urchin is a basic stats program.

Prior to Urchin, we had Deepmetrix.com. We were told that Urchin would be even better than Deepmetrix. In my opinion, Deepmetrix was one of the best advanced stats program out there and even better than webtrendslive.com

I wish Monstercommerce would give us a better stats program or allow us to load our own program onto the server to analyze the data in the logs.

Tigger,

We had many complaints about DeepMatrix, so we switched to Urchin. Many complain about Urchin. So I am not sure we will ever find a stats program that satisfies all...

It's interesting that you think DeepMatrix is better than WebTrendsLive. I think the opposite... I am not saying you are wrong, its just interesting.

Everyone has their own preferences and tastes regarding stats.

I'll add just a small little comment.
If DeepMetrix could be a little more stable and not be offline for more than 24 hours at a time than I think its a much better stats program than Urchin and I personally would love to have DeepMetrix back.
Like you said Captain, there will probably never be a stats program that satisfies everyone. But, I think most would love to have DeepMetrix back.
In fact i'll start a poll to find out.
Click Here for Poll

Good idea!

I posted a response regarding Urchin in the past.

To make a long story short, our *basic* Urchin stats offering is exactly that, *basic*.

Currently we are providing stats for over 2000 sites on our Urchin stats servers (stats1 and stats2), the overhead and time required to do full reverse DNS lookups is simply too great, and even now the only viable way to consistently provide stats information is to cycle daily grabbing the previous day's logs and processing them.

As I have said before, if and when a customer goes dedicated, a standalone instance of Urchin can be installed on one's dedicated server, which will allow for far more granular reporting of information, etc, etc.


The only other possibility past a dedicated Urchin instance or an outside solution is Urchin 5 (the latest version of Urchin). I communicate on a regular basis with the people @Urchin and from everything I have been told this latest version of Urchin is so improved that I will be able to allow reverse lookup information, which will translate on your end (the customer) to more detailed statistics reports. I have acquired our licenses for Urchin 5 and am preparing to upgrade both current stats servers and turn on more advanced reporting to see if the latest version will in fact make this a reality.

What I can assure you though, is that stats will still only update daily, because the basic stats service is a shared resource. On some of our dedicated customer's sites, stats update hourly with a greater degree of detail in information...but again this is for a standalone purchase instance, and not a shared stats instance.

The final issue I would like to address is Deep Metrix. I have seen so many people mention how much they liked Deep Metrix and things like this....it is amusing to me I don't see many people mention that at best DeepMetrix ran consistently for 2-3 days, and often times required repair of corrupt data down times that lasted over 24 hours at a time. I personally spent several months working daily with the people at Deep Metrix to no satisfactory result, and in the end it seemed that we would need to literally keep a person on staff to babysit the stats server, and this was just for approx. 1000 sites....Urchin may not be visually as pretty, and perhaps some more information should be shown (which again may be resolved with version 5), but to Urchin's credit, it has run with no problems for well over 4 months now and with greater than 2000 sites....which is exponentially better than the performance (or lack thereof) shown by Deep Metrix.

I do not believe any version of stats we could run would be perfect as someone always said...it's kind of a perpetual case of "the grass is always greener"...but I do think that this next Urchin upgrade should resolve a good deal more issues.

Also, I hope this post did not come across too gruff or blunt, I just saw this issue and wanted to respond directly and honestly...but they don't let me out of my admin cave much so my social skills aren't the best in the world

I have been with monstercommerce before most of you, including the tech staff. I joined them in April of 2000. At that time, webtrends live was the first stats program used, the Live Stats, by Deepmetrix was next.

I loved it because it gave detailed info, like how many sesseions were from new or return browsers, sessions/traffic by times of day. But other than a few things, Urchin is not a bad stats program for the money we are paying for it.

I guess once started to grow, Deepmetrix could not handle the volume and as they improved the shopping cart software and made it more advanced and robust, Deepmetrix must have had trouble with that, as well.

Thanks for the detailed synopsus by Adam. Sounds like he knows his stuff.



www.angelsessence.net

I have just spent some time looking over the stats information from Urchin 5 for MonsterCommerce.com. It seems to me that we now have a wide range of new/greater detail for domains, referrals, session tracking, regions, ip addresses, and even time-based information...etc, etc.

It seems to me that currently with Urchin 5, all of these issues people have mentioned that are lacking or that they want for stats reporting are in fact present, but nobody is taking the time to look through Urchin's reports and find them. Please do so, and I am more than open to feedback and discussion about Urchin so long as the people discussing their issues have actually taken the time to get acquainted with the reports, etc, etc. Remember, even if I or the other techs who work with Urchin are not sure, I can always get directly in touch with Urchin staff, up to and including the developers there to find solutions or answers or any kind.

I do have one more thing to say, and I do not know the best way to put it nicely. I am getting a little aggravated with one subject, and that is Deep Metrix. I have said it many times, and for what I hope will be the final time....Deep Metrix is not a viable solution. I *literally* spent months working on the back end day-to-day running of Deep Metrix stats, working with Deep Metrix technical support, development staff, and even QA people to just try and get Deep Metrix *reliably* processing information and staying stable for more than a few days. Honestly, there were a couple of times where a whole week of my time was spent 90% with Deep Metrix, and I am not joking or exaggerating, several times was told flat out that they could not fix things, nor did they ultimately care about why even a system with 5 servers *JUST* running collectors, with one dedicated database server and one dedicated web front end for customers to view stats was still locking up, getting corrupted data, or just generally failing. Furthermore, several of the posts that seem to recall the "good old days" of Deep Metrix are from customers who during the midst of our use of Deep Metrix submitted tickets full of dissatisfaction to our "worthless, unstable, unreliable" stats system, and at the time the common theme was "sure it's pretty, when it works...which seems to be less often than when it's down".

I put in a lot of time on the issue, as did other staff and at least 3 technicians, 2 developers, and one QA person at Deep Metrix. In the end though, it was a lost cause, and now we have Urchin. Urchin runs well, it appears from my analysis to have all the information one could want as compared to Deep Metrix, and something that almost counts more, the Urchin company itself is committed to helping improve their product and deliver customer satisfaction.

In a nutshell what I am saying (with the risk of getting a reprimand from higher up) is please stop beating a dead horse about Deep Metrix. Try Urchin, give it some fair use and unbiased evaluation, and let's even discuss what you need from it....and I can assure you like everything else with MonsterCommerce, we will work as hard as possible to make you as happy as we can.

In closing, Deep Metrix is dead...long live Urchin

P.S. - thanks for the compliment Tigger!

Hi All,

I think, for what it is intended to do that Urchin does a fine job. I was also around during the DeepMetrix era and I remember the unreliabliltiy and all that and was grateful that took the time to do the research and to find something that gave us basic statistics.

One of the problems I have with Urchin, and with Deep Metrix as well as any other stat program is that I don't know what a lot of this stuff means and how I can use it to my benefit. Certainly it was fun to see how many were on line when we had Deep MEtrix but what could we do with that info to grow our business.

What I would like to see discussed, and your input would be very appreciated Adminguy, is how to read these stats to our advantage. Right now I look at just a few things.

The first thing I look at is the Sessions chart because I think it tells me how many people went to my home page. I find Hits useless since my store has lots of graphics and it counts requests

The "Page Query Terms" under Pages and Files seems to be a really interesting report for us since it will show you what your top dynamic page views were. The product.asp page is usually the most requested page but that means nothing. In "Page Query Term" you can see what products were the most popular one. Very useful

PErhaps if could define what a lot of these pages do we could read our stats easier. For example I see that the action.asp page is the most requested form. What is the action.asp and what does it do?

One thing I have done, and I shared this somewhere else on this forum, is that I created special graphics for each of the catagory pages. I saved each of these graphics in a folder called Headers. Now I can go to "Pages & Files" "All Files" and filter by "headers" and now I can see what my top visited catagories are. This helps me determine what my visitors are most interested in.

If there is anything lacking with Urchin, and it was lacking in DeepMetrix as well, is stats specific to ecommerce. Tracking the customers trail through the inital entrance to the close. As well as tracking for PPC campaigns and how to set up tracking links for email campaigns etc. There is a program called HitsLinks that has an enterprise version that give you a lot of info on your shopper. That would be the kind of thing I would be interested in and I would be willing to pay extra to gain that type of infromation. What do you think?

What do the rest of you do with the stats we have to help you grow your business.

It seems to me, correvt me if I am wrong but won't this information change as soon as we are upgraded to version 4.0?

Although I am a little out of touch on the new version, what I have read seems like the pages will be renamed, hopefully making it easier to see what pages are getting hit.

Hoping!

The pages will change, this is correct, and I am looking into *possibly* tracking the URI stems as well. This would add tremenedous overhead to Urchin processing, even now, so I am a bit leary to look ino it, but after this weeks Urchin 5.0 in the wild testing runs I will examine this option more. Another reason that I am not sure how useful this feature will be is that even if we tracked URI stem components, such as product.asp?id=4 or something like that, it still does not help too much to see that 300 people viewed id #4....

I am also examining the Urchin commerce reporting features, but this is a very painful tasks and requires the actual stats config to be updated every time the customer changes the product information on their site (i.e. - pricing, discount amounts, etc, etc)....it is a very difficult area in general because I am trying to add as much as I can to the stats program, yet ultimately as has been said before...our stats server as a *basic* shared service.

In any case, I am hoping I can make Urchin reporting even more valuable to our customers, and am also looking into providing a write-up/walk through of the Urchin web stats package for everyone. Please be a litle patient as the walk through is on an "as time permits" development schedule.

My two cents -- URI tracking would be a big help. Being a 4.0 tester -- I only see index.asp in my tracking and really have no way of telling where people go from there. For example, we run an ad about product X, how do we know unless we use a custom page for the ad? So, my vote goes for URI tracking (unless it blows the machine up or requires 4000 dual Xeon servers.

Many of the other stats are very helpful -- we are culling good info from the stats package as it exists.