There are two products from Google for Web analytics- Google Analytics & Urchin Software. This question is always strike to the mind of Web Analytics guys that which product has to choose. Because both products have some pros & cons, so i am providing my consents which help you in deciding to choose between Google Analytics & Urchin.

A general statement is that Google Analytics is used mainly by Marketers & Urchin is used mainly by IT department.

When Google Analytics is used

Use Google Analytics when your marketing department is not ready to pay some handsome money on a Web Analytics package to track effectiveness of marketing campaigns. As Google Analytics is much easy to implement & has stronger Adwords & Adsense and most important thing is that it is Maintenance Free. Google conducts the data collection, storage & program upgrades. This is considered as major benefit for large organization where web analytics is important for Marketing department but less for IT department. As Google Analytics does not requires any disk spaces on your server to process & store visitor data log files, so the security & privacy of collected information of your visitor data is taken care by Google, so it will reduce additional overheads from your IT department.

When Urchin is used

There are some big organizations which are more concern about privacy & security of their visitor data & they do not want to share their visitor data with any third party vendors. In this scenario Urchin fits the best. Urchin is standalone software which is exclusively purchased & installed on our own dedicated servers, hence all visitors activity are stored on our own servers. This will give us ability to reprocess historical data & also we can take backup of our visitor data so that if in any hardware crash or if we migrated from one environment to another, we can recover our data.

The most important benefit is that Urchin track visitors individually (anonymously), Google Analytics does not track visitors anonymously as it is against their privacy policy. So at this point you can take benefit of Urchin.

If you have intranet website which is behind the firewall & that blocks the internet activity, then Urchin is the best solution to track visitor activity on intranet application.

Recommendations
My recommendation is to use Google Analytics wherever possible because it is easy to implement & handle. It has easy to use drag & drop style sticky interface which is easy to understand. Google Analytics is primarily aimed to Digital Marketers. If you have some specific technical requirements or security & privacy concerns then go for Urchin software. Urchin currently lacks some marketing features which are in GA, though it can track visitor anonymously.

Love to hear your comments.

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