Strange metrics coming from Urchin

[WebStatsFan]

My company has been using Urchin 3.4 for our web analytics solution (yes, I know...very outdated)

I notice large spikes in daily visits on days when we deliver HTML content to our mailing list. Our theory is that Urchin is somehow counting images served as unique visitors. The total visitor count is too large to be accurate, based on other anecdotal evidence.

Is anyone familiar with this system, or more importantly, this dilemma? We'll soon be moving to a much improved analytics system, but I'd like to solve this problem once and for all. Urchin/Google no longer supports v. 3.4, so I've turned to the boards.

Anyone?

Thanks in advance.

[wizardofx]

Sure, if your graphics from the mailing are all being snagged
from your web site, Urchin will record those as a unique visitor snagging a graphic off the web site.

What do you expect them to do?

best regards
wiz

[wizardofx]

Urchin can do this a much better job if you ask it to, take a look at http://www.google.com/support/urchin45/bin/answer.py?answer=28710

In order to get the advanced tracking you need to add a
script to each page, which sets and reads cookies. Even Omniture requires that.

If you don't want to bother with that Urchin can give good statitistics
but of course it can be fooled, as you point out.

best regards
wiz

[brian.mark]

I don't specifically know if older versions of Urchin can handle filtering by extension, but if so that may be an answer. Just filter out images (jpg, gif) from your stats and then look at the reports.

Brian.

[WebStatsFan]

Great, thank you for the tips everyone.