7 Days of Urchin 7: Day 1 - Overview
Urchin 7, after much anticipation, has finally been released! With it comes a whole slew of new features, and upgrades. As a tribute to this momentous occasion, I've decided to write a series of blog posts called "7 Days of Urchin 7". In this 7 post series, I'll cover the following areas:
- installation and migration of your existing Urchin 6 data
- speed and performance benefits
- advanced segmentation
- event tracking
- custom reports & data API version 2
- filters, lookup tables, and customizable geo data
Features/Benefits
Urchin 7 is releasing a slew of new features, so I'll only cover the ones that I deem most useful.
- Performance - Urchin 7 has been upgraded to run natively on 64-bit OS's and utilize parallel profile processing
- Advanced Segmentation - Urchin now has the ability to segment your visitors within reports, just like GA
- Event Tracking - Ever wanted to track the number of clicks on a banner ad, the number of video plays, or other events on your website? Well, now you can! And, if you were tracking it in GA on your website already and sending the data to your logs for Urchin 6, you can reprocess those logs and get event reporting immediately!
- Custom Reports - Now, you can have tabbed reports and cross-reference reports.
- Customizable Geo-location Data - If you don't need to know the exact cities of all your visitors world-wide, why spend the time processing it? With the new selectable geo-location data sets in Urchin 7, you can get the in-depth geographical information for regions you are interested in and speed up processing time.
- Custom Ordering of Filters
- Improved Lookup Tables
Buy Urchin 7
An Urchin 7 license costs $9,995 for new users, $7000 for upgrades. This is a one-time, non-recurring cost. The license provides:
- Unlimited data sources
- Up to 1,000 report profiles
- Unlimited users, groups, and accounts
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I already have Urchin running and I use GA but as far as I can tell the two are separate entities.
How exactly would I get Urchin to "process" the GA data, or do i even need to, given that it's already running?
Thanks
However, Urchin does use the same javascript-based data collection techniques as GA, so you should have the same data in each (though with some extra from Urchin's log file analyzer).
Having both is useful however, as it lets you confirm data trends and analyze in different ways (GA has more analysis features, Urchin gathers more data).
Usually, people use Urchin as a backup to their GA data. They'll send data to both GA and Urchin using the "setLocalRemoteServerMode" function call. Once it's in Urchin, you have the power of creating your own custom reports, and re-processing the data if you accidentally configured something incorrectly, or need to get more data into the reports.
If you have specific articles you can point to, I would be able to expand more on what they are doing with their Urchin and GA data.
I have two further questions/concerns.
1: As I said, we already have urchin running as a separate entity. So at the moment we use it to check data trends and as a back up. It's also obviously getting the data from our server
If we used the "setlocalremoteservermode" call that would be getting the data from Google and sending it back to Urchin, and either overwriting the existing data or we would have to set up another instance of Urchin?
2: The reason I'm asking all of this is because i know Google only keeps it's data for around 2 years. So if i want to do any longer term analysis, that means I have to do it in Urchin.
I'd rather do it in GA.
It's in your Blogroll.