Overview
Urchin is a website analysis software that gives you the information about website visitors. Urchin Traffic Monitor(UTM) is a tracking method that identifies unique visitors to your website.
There are two components in UTM system: UTM Sensor and UTM Engine. By default, UTM system is running with UTM Engine only. If you add UTM Sensor to the system, it will provide you with more accurate and complete reports. For example:
- If a visitor opens a website's page A first, and goes to page B, and then comes back to page A, the UTM engine will read the server log and count the visits as two. The reason is that page A in the first visit has been cached in the browser. When the visitor comes back to Page A, the browser displays the cached page instead of connecting to server again. If you have UTM sensor installed, it will add the client-side information to the report and count the visits as three.
- If a visitor accesses your website with a laptop in city A and then in city B, the UTM engine will reckon the actions are from two different visitors. The reason is that the same laptop is assigned different IP addresses by the Internet Service Providers(ISP) in different cities. The UTM engine tracks the unique visitors based on their unique IPs. As a result, the same visitor is reported as two unique ones. If the UTM senor is installed, it will track the visitors by the cookie identifiers instead of the IP address. The report will show that the visits are actually from one visitor.
Installation
Including UTM Sensor is easy, requiring just three steps:
- Download __utm.gif and __utm.js and upload them to your site's public/www directory.
Tip The __utm.js will be initially downloaded as __utm.zip. Make sure to decompress the file first, and then upload the extracted __utm.js file to your web directory.
- Paste the following codes into the top of every html page on your site, between the <head> and </head> tags.
<script src="/__utm.js" type="text/javascript"></script> - Log in to the Toolkit and "Toggle" the UTM status to be Enabled.
You now have a complete UTM system enabled. Adding UTM Sensor will only improve accuracy of the future reports. It will not change the data in the previous reports. To access the Urchin report, use urchin.ilisys.com.au.
Note If you enabled the UTM status (in step 3) without finishing the step 1 and 2, you may encounter incorrect or blank reports.
