47 replies to this topic

[imagerage]

i like urchin but it's too expensive for me!

[Jill]

Welcome imagerage!

Sometimes you have to spend a little money to make a little money.

[Randy]

And sometimes you just have to find a host that already has it installed instead of using their On Demand pricing module.

[PPCBidtracker_Guy]

I've talked with a few analytics providers. From what I've gathered (sifting through all the propoganda), Urchin is decent. Its more of a starting point analytics tool in that it doesn't offer as much of the in depth reporting as some of the others. It is priced less and offers a little less. If all you are looking for is basic traffic and revenue data, then its more than adequate.

[Internet-Engine]

I bought a licence to 5.7 and I have several complaints. My sales rep made several promises that Urchin has not kept. I have tried to contact my sales rep since this time and my phone calls and emails have gone unanswered. I have tried and tried to elevate this but I can not get a return phone call from any rep at Urchin or even Google. Here are the problems I have encountered:

1) Promised telephone support from Urchin. There is no telephone support and the online support is very difficult to use. They require you to enter your authorization code (a very long number which is a pain to find and enter ) before they will even allow you to write a support request. Then it is hit or miss whether or not they will respond.

2) I was promised an upgrade to 6.0 within a month, (this was six months ago) and while they have been acquired by Google since then they should still honor this request. I believe the intent was to come out with a newer version for Urchin on Demand and release 6.0 for the 5.7 users.

3) I have not been able to get Urchin does not track the detail pages on my ASP websites. It will track the main page: www.ABC.com/detail.asp but drops any information relating to the specific pages that follow: www.ABC.com/detail.asp?Area=658. This is one of the topics that I've requested support on but have not been able to get Urchin to respond.

4) This may be specific to Urchin 5.7 but I've found that the the Urchin tool will shut down and then to restart the product I have to go into DOS mode (remember DOS?) and enter 5 or six lines of programmer code to restart the product. There is no warning and no notification of a problem from Urchin. To find out if the product is locked up, I have to look at the reports for all of my websites and see when data is no longer being reported.

Overall, the product is okay, but I would not have bought the product if I knew that I was going to be treated so poorly by the people at Urchin.

[Randy]

Welcome Internet-Engine !

First, it sounds to me like there's definitely some sort of configuration issue that needs to be resolved. I've been running various versions of Urchin on several servers for errmmm...well years now, and I've never had it shut down once on me. So something is triggering that, which may be a contributing factor to some of the other things you mentioned.

You'll want to stay on Urchin Support about that. Because something's not right.

1. No clue on that one. I've never had to contact their support for anything. The most I've ever had to do was look in their Manual/Help Files that are freely available.

2. I would tend to agree that Google should have to abide by the previous promise.

3. Do you have the UTM module installed and running? Where you put a bit of code in your page? I don't know if that's required or not because I have it enabled for all of my sites. It may not be a requirement.

Anyway, look under Pages & Files > Page Query Terms. What you're looking for with the variables should be located there. You can drill down farther by clicking on the little blue arrow next to each entry.

4. See above. Sounds like a config problem to me. But having never experienced anything like that I wouldn't know where to start looking. Is anything being recorded to your log files when it fails?

[Internet-Engine]

Thanks for the advice but the biggest problem I have is that Urchin does not respond to the support requests I've submitted. I'd love to reach them. Do you (perhaps) have a phone number to someone at Urchin so I can have an actual conversation about these issues.

[Randy]

I dug through some old info I had and the only thing I found appears to be numbers to their sales dept. And I'm not even sure that they're good anymore since I seem to recall reading somewhere that Urchin was moving their headquarters from San Diego to Mountain View?

Anyway, this is all I could find. Maybe it'll be useful.

Toll Free : 1-888-8 URCHIN
Local Dial (San Diego number): 619-233-1400

[dyland]

It seems Urchin are good at not keeping their promises. I too bought 5.7 on the understanding that 6.0 would come out as software in a month or two. They then fed me the line 'it just had to go through QA one more time'.

I can confirm the other things Internet-Engine said - the thing tends to hang more than crash, but to get it restarted you have to run a bunch of DOS commands. What's worse is you don't know its stopped working as it doesn't mail you. Then when you restart you have to work out how to download the missing days for all of your profiles - currently over 30 - all different.

The 30 profiles is the reason I could never move to their On-Demand product. Web Trends has a similar pricing model and is out of the question also. Perhaps there's an open source alternative that's better than analog - anyone know of one?

[Haystack]

But that small amount of code will then load a 20K script from the Urchin server.

Actually, the 20K script has to be installed on your own server, then referenced from every page of your site.

Graphics-wise, the On-Demand service has integrated Flash into the display of the graphs, so you can right-click to zoom in. An interesting enhancement.

[spiritsoul]

Hi !

I have a problem using Urchin 6.0 Demand.

Itś abut capturing the e-commerce transactions.

I have put the code:
<script src="/__utm.js" type="text/javascript"></script> on my homepage
head, and thatś works perfectly. But it doens work with the code below

CODE

   <form style="display:none;" name="utmform"><textarea id="utmtrans">

   UTM:T|[order-id]|[affiliation]|[total]|[tax]|[shipping]|[city]|[state]|[country]
   UTM:I|[order-id]|[sku/code]|[productname]|[category]|[price]|[quantity]

   </textarea></form><body onLoad="javascript:__utmSetTrans()">

I have made an example file below, and just put numbers instead of order -id. I just wanted to test if it worled.

CODE

<html>
<head><title>skoj</title>
<script src="__utm.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
Welcome
<form style="display:none;" name="utmform">

<textareaid="utmtrans">

UTM:T|34|affiliation|10|2|1|san diego|smaland|Sverige

UTM:I|34|xp-10|nike|shoes|7|1

</textarea></form>

<script language="javascript">__utmSetTrans();</script>


</body>
</html>

And in the urchin 6.0 demand I just chosed

General Settings
Website URL: www.test.com (using another site) (
Default Page: www.test.com/index.hl,(e.g., index.html)
Revenue Source: E-commerce Data
Page Parameters Match: exclude SID
Localization
Currency Symbol:None
Precision: 2

Activate Goal: on
Goal Web Address:www.test.com
Goal Name: goal 1
Goal Value (Revenue): 0

But when I check for transaction I just get zero transation. What am I doing wrong, need help badly.

[Jill]

Welcome spiritsoul!

Have you tried checking the Urchin help files or their support?

[Randy]

Welcome spiritsoul !

Not sure how much help I'm going to be trying to troubleshoot this one since I use the Installed version of Urchin instead of the On Demand version. For the installed version I have have php dumping the e-commerce info into a little log file on my server that Urchin then reads from.

A question or three... Does the On Demand version access any log files on your server? Or is that what the __utmSetTrans(); call is supposed to do?

Also, is that javascript function part of their base __utm.js file?

Last thought...

I know with the installed version instructions tell you to put the call to the __utm.js script at the very bottom of the page so that it doesn't affect the load time of the page adveresly. Is this where you have it on your test page?

The reason that I ask is that if you're calling the __utmSetTrans(); function as a BODY onLoad event, you'll need to the call to the __utm.js file to be above the BODY tag in your page to get any kind of consistency in your reporting. Otherwise the onLoad is going to be trying to run a js function that doesn't yet exist.

[oneofthe3lions]

I would suggest people try this ''hitslink''.. it seems really good if you cant afford urchin

[mitash]

How can I get Urchin 5.7 or less...?