Urchin Web Analytics Now at InforME

By Tim Swan, InforME

InforME is now hosting Urchin, a web analytics solution sold by Google featuring functionality similar to Google Analytics. Urchin will help agency website coordinators better understand their website traffic, viewer characteristics, and visitor browsing experience.

Urchin is extremely powerful software that provides the following benefits over the old web analytics package (Report Magic):

• User accessible reports from the Urchin control panel.
• Automated running of log file reports means that statistics are current to within the last two days. The old statistics package was run manually once a month, which was time consuming and resulted in stale statistics.
• A wealth of statistics data: page views, visits, and hits; visitor platform and browser; search terms used to find the site; etc.
• All data may be downloaded to a csv file for opening in Excel.
• Reporting of error codes and the page requests that generate the errors.
• The ability to customize the date range of reports, and to filter reports for specific files or directories.

Agency web coordinators will find the wealth of information provided by Urchin helpful in planning website features that focus on their visitor's behavior, as well as in maintaining their existing site. To help agency web coordinators make the most of the software, InforME plans on creating online support documentation, as well as giving training tutorials at the monthly web coordinator and webmaster meetings.

Urchin accounts are currently available for any agency web coordinator. To have an account set up, just fill out the form on the webmaster resource center: http://www.maine.gov/webmasters/tools/urchinaccountrequest.htm