As per my previous post, we’re looking at our options for web analytics.
I know that Google recently bought Urchin.com , and I heard that Urchin just slashed their prices for their services so I figured I’d give em a try. We’re paying $300 a month ($200 for first 100,000 page views and $100 for each additional million)
The good:

• The reports look very nice.
• The reports provide me with most of the information I need.
• The site’s responce time is fine.

The bad:

• Service sucks. There is no telephone support and the emails are usually answered within 24 hours. Ocasionally the responses don’t really help much either.
• Not all of the web analytics I need is provided. For example, I’d like to be able to view my bounce rates per campaign.

The other option we’re checking is Net Tracker SMB.
List price is $7,500 but we’re upgrading so we’re getting a better deal.
The good:

• Service is excellent. I’m just evaluating and already I’m getting my questions answered on the phone within minutes.
• I can basically query any question I can come up with

The bad:

• Since we’re looking at an in-house solution, we’re gonna need to buy a high end maching to handle our queries.
• The reports don’t look as nice

Pretty soon we’re going to be re-evaluating our current solution for web analytics: NetTracker Professional.
At the time (a couple of years ago) it was the best solution for us because of it’s bang for the buck value.
Currently, we’re better funded and have more complex needs, so we’re also considering more expensive solutions.

I’ll write more about my findings here later.

We recently laucnhed a new shopping cart on our site, so I decided to check out how it’s doing. Most of the stats looked fine, but the visitor path report was showing almost impossible paths for the checkout process.
A normal path should look something like this:

1. Add to cart
2. Shipping info
3. Billing info
4. Confirm order
5. Thank you

What we were getting was this:

1. Add to cart
2. Shipping info
3. Home Page
4. Billing info
5. Confirm order
6. Thank you

I had a few theories about why this was happening, but none of them really made much sense. Upon further investigations, I found the culprit. Instead of a dedicated 404 page, we were simply redirecting to the homepage. This includes 404 errors for images.
What was happening is that there was a bad link to an image on the page, so the homepage was being requested.
Of course visitors didn’t know the difference, but it was really messing up the web analytics.

Case solved!