Google Analytics offers an easy way to get statistics of your website, but one of his major drawbacks is that
you can’t analyze historical data. Luckly, I found a software that can do that, Urchin 5.
Feed your logs into Urchin
Feed your log files into Urchin
zip your log files (e.g. logfiles.zip)
in Profiles>Log manager add a new profile
the popup will ask you the following:
Log file location – choose local
Log file path – select the path to your zipped file ( in my case, logfiles.zip).
Log format – choose auto
Get your reports
Now click on Profiles menu again and in the table you’ll see the newly created profile listed. Click on run (the lightning icon), this will run the analysis of the log source.
Then, on view (the zoom icon) to see the results. These open in a separate tab and on the left you can see the menu to navigate through the different reports. The most important for me are:
Traffic>Summary, which shows totals and averages for Sessions, Pageviews, Hits, and Byte. You can see details for each of these by clicking on the corresponding item in the Traffic menu.
Page&Files> Requested Pages, which ranks the popularity of the Pages
Page&Files> Downloads, ranks the popularity of all Downloads on your site by number of requests
All Files> All Files by Hits, ranks the popularity of all files on your site by number of requests, which is important to detect for example how many times a given document has been downloaded or an image been viewed.
Navigation> Entrance pages, which indicates which is thepage from which Visitors entered your website (the first page they saw).
Referrals>Referrals, which list the referring URLs (external web pages) that brought traffic to your site.
Browers &Robots> Browsers, ranks the browsers used by the public to access your site.
Browers &Robots> Platforms, ranks the platforms (e.g. Windows,Mac…) used by the public to access your site.
Each statistic can also be exported in different formats. I personally choose .doc as it appears to be the easiest to read, but you can have your data in Excel or tab separated, plain text. And of course, you can also print them.
Advantages and Disadvantages
A major drawback is that Urchin software is not free! The demo licence expires after 90 days.
A major advantage, it can be used with Google Analytics:
- Copy your Google Analytics tracking code into a text editor.
- Add the line in bold below to your tracking code (your actual code will contain your account and profile number in place of xxxx-x):
<script type=quot;text/javascript">var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));</script>
<script type="text/javascript">var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");pageTracker._setLocalRemoteServerMode();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
This additional line will serve the pageview to Urchin Software as well as Google Analytics, allowing you to gather data with both products.
- Then, remove this line of code from your webpages: <script src=”__utm.js” type=”text/javascript”>
- Add the tracking code to each of your pages.
