Urchin Guide
An Introduction to Urchin
Urchin is a web-based application that provides graphical reports on your website's usage. It can show you how many people have visited your website, where they came from and what pages they viewed.
As with any type of statistics proper interpretation of the data is important. This guide will introduce the most useful reports, as well as explaining some of the terminology you are likely to come across.
Please bear in mind that if your website is new then not much data will have been recorded yet. Your Urchin report will become more useful over time as the website becomes established and visitor numbers increase.
Before we begin, please don't be afraid to log-in right now and explore your Urchin report - you can't break anything!
Accessing Your Urchin Report
Urchin is accessed on the back of your website at /urchin. For example if your website address were www.example.com then you would access urchin at www.example.com/urchin.
When you access Urchin you will be prompted to login as shown below:
Enter the username and password provided to you and click Login.
Note: If you find you are unable to connect to Urchin and don't even get the login screen then it's likely your firewall is blocking outgoing connections to port 8080. The Urchin server runs on the http-alternate port (8080)) and so you will have to ask your IT department to allow connections to that port.
Most Useful Reports
The most useful reports in Urchin are listed below:
- Traffic / Daily Graph
- Traffic / Summary
- Referrals / Top Referrals
- Referrals / Top Keywords
A report showing the number of visitors to your site over the past 7 days.
A summary useful figures such as totals and averages for visitor numbers.
A list showing the top 10 websites that are linking to your site and the number of visitors that have followed the link.
A list showing the search phrases of visitors who found your website on a search engine.
Sessions, Page Views, Hits and Bytes
Having selected a report you can choose to view that same report it in terms of four different types of information:
- Sessions
- Page Views
- Hits
- Bytes
A session is a real person visiting the website and having a click around. A single session is recorded for each visitor no matter how many pages they view, but if they go away and come back some time later then this is considered another session. Viewing reports in terms of sessions is the best way to monitor visitor usage.
A page view is a person viewing a page. A page view is recorded every time a visitor views a page. Viewing reports in terms of page views is useful to see how long visitors spend on your website.
A hit is a technical term referring to a single request from a client. A hit is recorded for every file requested from the server by a client. Note that multiple hits will usually be recorded for a single page view. Viewing reports in terms of hits is the best way for technical people to monitor web-server load.
A byte is a technical term referring to the transfer of a certain quantity of data between the server and the client. There are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte (KB) and 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte (MB). Viewing reports in terms of bytes is the best way for technical people to monitor bandwidth usage.
You can contact the Support Team by telephone between 9:00AM and 5:30PM on 0845 880 1221, selecting the support contract option, or you can email us on support@tradeweb.co.uk.