What is Google Urchin Analytics?
A couple of years back there were two major players in the online web analytics scene. The first being WebTrends, still a major force to be reckoned with, and the other Urchin. When Google came onto the scene and started dominating the online search space, they realized what was missing from their GLOBAL WEBSITE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM, Google webstats.
Google has a set of webmaster management tools for those of you that don't already know, called Google Webmaster Tools :). These tools consist of Sitemaps, Adsense a couple of other tools and of course now Analytics. Google bought over Urchin (then a very expensive product) and made it a freely available analytics software for the world to use. Ingenious if you ask me!!!
The only problem with Google Urchin/Analytics is that the information pulled through from those stats are kept of the Google analytics servers and not on your own secure servers, bringing on another very big talking point for another article, on the security and integrity of your stats when using Google Analytics. That said, it's an amazing piece of software, not customizable as yet, until the paid version is released (scheduled for the 2nd quarter of 2008
). It's free and for startups it's easy to use, easy to setup and very very cheap!
This piece of software gets my TWO THUMBS UP!
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