It's officially here! Urchin 6 has been released for purchase today, April 16th, 2008!

Timeline: In October, Urchin 6 was released in limited beta and then in February, the Urchin 6 beta became available to the public and TODAY it's finally available for purchase!

Features: The interface is now similar to Google Analytics, and there is a greater focus on the usability aspect. Up to 1,000 profiles (domains), log sources, e-commerce, and campaign tracking are all included with this one time purchase.

Urchin 6 will include individual visitor-level tracking, report cross-segmentation and a full suite of geo-targeting reports! The campaign tracking features in Urchin 6 have also been re-engineered to be easier for somebody who is looking to track their SEO/SEM efforts.

Price: Urchin 6 is available for $2,995, and this price includes the full functionality of the software. That means you no longer need to worry about purchasing all those different types of modules. With Urchin 6, you can run e-commerce and campaign tracking functionality on multiple servers with no extra cost!

Upgrading: For owners of standard Urchin 5 licenses, Urchin Software is available for a discounted price. The amount paid for the Urchin 5 installation will be applied towards the cost of Urchin 6 Software. For example, if you purchased the base module of Urchin 5 for $895, then Urchin 6 Software would cost $2,100 ($2995 - $895).

Benefits: Those who might benefit from Urchin the most would be those who prefer to keep their data on machines they can control, those who would like to process historical data, those who need their data audited by third parties, and those who would like to track on an intranet.

ROI Revolution is an Urchin 6 reseller and so if you are ready for Urchin 6, go to www.roirevolution.com/urchin/urchin-six.htm to purchase or upgrade to Urchin 6 today!

Updates: If you would like to receive up to the minute information only about Urchin, sign up for the Urchin Update List!

They grow up so fast, don't they? Today at ad:tech in San Francisco, Google announced that its multivariate testing tool, Google Website Optimizer, was coming out of beta and getting its own digs. Here's the official announcement.

Up until recently, the only way to use Google's free tool to test and improve your website's content was through a tab in AdWords. Now that Google Website Optimizer has moved on to the big leagues, it has a new standalone website independent of AdWords, where you can log on and start running tests right away.

Here's a look at the new multivariate walkthrough:

Read on for a list of new improvements and support options...

Continue reading "Google Website Optimizer Graduates from Google Beta" »

In Google Analytics, there are a couple different ways to match up the products you sell with the keywords that brought users to your site.

The first method is already built right in to Google Analytics. All you need to do is look under the Ecommerce section of your Google Analytics profile and expand the Product Performance section. There you'll find a report called Product Overview. In this report, you'll see a list of all the products that were sold for the given date range. You can click on an individual product and segment it by Keyword to see which keywords were responsible for the product sale.

But what about when you want to see things the other way around? In other words, for each keyword, can you see which products were sold? Well, if you use the above method, you'd have to segment each and every product. That's not very efficient.

Luckily, you can use filters to find this information pretty easily. Here's how:

Continue reading "Products and Keywords in Google Analytics" »

Today Google released new graphing features to help make trends more visible. Previously, you could only view day-to-day trends in the timeline. Now in addition to viewing the data by day,

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you can now see the data by week...

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and by month...

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This will help you compare long-term trends and make visualizing these trends much easier. You can also use these new graphing features to compare metrics. You can compare the last two weeks to the next two weeks, or even on a year to year basis.

These graphing features are found right below the date selection tool, above the timeline, and can be found on all reports within Google Analytics.

For more information on these features you can check out the Google Analytics Blog.

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Everybody makes mistakes at some point, but there are ways to help prevent those mistakes from making their way into your Google Analytics reports.

With Google Analytics, you do not have the option to reprocess data like you do with log file analytics systems, so it's important that you are cautious with the changes you're making to your profiles.

If you set up a new filter incorrectly and no one notices for two weeks that you are collecting the wrong data, there is no way to go back and reprocess that data. It's gone and it's not coming back. Because of this, it is highly recommended that you make your filter, goal, and/or funnel changes to a test profile before making them to your main profile. By collecting the results in a test profile, you can gauge whether or not you are receiving the outcome you anticipated.

Likewise, if you create a new filter or goal, it will only affect the data from that point moving forward. For example, if you only want to include visitor traffic to a specific subdirectory, your historical data will still include visitor traffic to the rest of your site. This can also make things tricky with goals and funnels.

Also, if you create a new profile for an existing domain, you will not have access to historical data within that new profile. Profiles only collect data that is processed after they were created, so you may want to create several profiles at once if you think you may want to use the historical data in a later profile.

Recently, Google Analytics had introduced a new feature called Benchmarking, where you can see your stats compared to others' in your industry. If you decide to opt-in to data sharing, Google Analytics will include historical data up to a month before your opt-in date.

And for those of you who haven't switched over from urchin.js yet, historical data will be kept when you move your site over to ga.js, so don't worry.

So don't forget to test before you implement anything new to your main profile, and consider keeping a change log of the changes to your profiles. Remember that any changes you make won't change your historical data.

Find The Secret To Solid, Sustainable Improvements To Your Website
Learn the insider secrets to making more money from your website than ever before – Guaranteed! Get started right away with the Google Analytics Training Course..