We recently made the switch from ClickTracks to Urchin, mainly because Lyris have bafflingly chosen to leave ClickTracks to gather dust and slowly decay.

As our company has been using ClickTracks since 2003, making the move from the familiar to the unknown has been understandably painful but necessary.

However in our initial tests, we were surprised to see Urchin significantly over-reporting the figures in their reports.

After some digging, we found the reason why. By default, Urchin reports visitors and bots together.

In other words if the home page of your website was visited by 1000 human visitors and 500 different bots on a given day, Urchin would report this as 1,500 hits to the page.

Bear in mind that some bots might hit pages on your website regularly throughout the day. We’ve seen data sets where there are more bot hits than visitors.

As a user of Urchin, why on earth would you want to merge these two data groups together?

I can see this being useful when considering server load, but for regular reporting, I can’t see any valid reason for this.

Excluding the bots is fairly straightforward, but if you’re using the default settings, you should make sure you’re sitting down when you first view your ‘real’ data.

You’re going to discover that you’re not getting anywhere near as many visitors as you thought.

The question is why would Urchin choose to set this up by default? Why distort the data?

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