I have discussed Web analytics and Urchin several times on this site. I am a huge fan of Urchin, and if you do a search on Urchin within this site, you can find all my posts on it. These entry is to discuss some of the new features added to the 5.6 versus, an upgrade from version 5.5.
You can view all the changes here, but I will highlight some of the cool enhancements that I noticed right off the bat.
First is a new view called "Bounce Rate" "report that shows how frequently visitors entered and immediately exited a site, by landing page." Take a look at this graph, click on the graph to see more detail.
We all know this is a very important statistic, that most of us try to get to by creating our own spreadsheets and working out the numbers. Urchin now made it very easy to view these bounce rates with a click of a button. Definitions of fields on enlarged view are: "Bounces" is the number of times visitors exited from the page without visiting any other pages on the site. "Entrances" is the total number of entrances on the page. "Bounce Rate" is the percentage of entrances on the page that resulted in exits without viewing any other page on the site. It is calculated as Bounces divided by Entrances.
Some other enhancements to note include:
- Wizard that allows the manual entry of cost and impression data for any campaign data point. This includes email campaigns. - A much needed 'View by" feature on the date range setting interface that allows the user to view data on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis - And more.
Keep in mind, I do not work for Urchin, I am just a very satisfied customer that loves tools to help manage a sites marketing efforts. Also the bounce rates on this site tend to be high, but I will assume that most people come to the homepage and then jump off. My other sites, the bounce rates are much lower dependent (dependent on the page).
