Google told us all towards the end of last week that our Urchin accounts would be only semi-accessible over the weekend as they were converting to "Google accounts".
What they didn't tell anyone was that they were also changing Urchin over to being a free service.
When you go to urchin.com you are redirected to google.com/analytics and asked to sign in with your google account or create one for your existing login to urchin. Verify your email address and off you go.
The reports haven't changed, but the user interface has been overhauled.
The Urchin blue is gone and has been replaced by a very vibrant orange - probably too vibrant - I feel my eyes are going to start hurting soon.
They've also added a drop down selection menu to the navigation bar to allow easier movement between web accounts. Nice little addition.
I have been using Urchin for about 2 months for our main site, this site and a couple of other ones that I run. It should be interesting to see how this new business model affects the rest of the market.
So what is free?
According to the terms of service:
the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.While I'm sure that this move will be greeted with big grins by many people it also sounds like Google have just got rid of a lot of their competitors..... Monopoly anyone?
Noticied that this morning alright. We bought urchin 5 about a year ago now and were thinking of migrating to urchin 6. I'm concerned about the whole monopoly situation but I've yet to see how good the new stats are.
Anthony - We had tried v5 but I wasn't too impressed with the GeoIP functions as they relied solely on the TLD of the ISP, which was fairly meaningless. We were assured that v6 would be released shortly afterwards - ie. first quarter 2005. It never happened.
We signed up for v6 a couple of months ago as I was very frustrated with the lack of detail in Awstats. Urchin is a lot better than Awstats, though it is not perfect. It can also be very overwhelming if you have previously used much simpler (and less powerful) solutions
GeoIP wasn't such a big issue for us back then. It is now though. :) I find awstats and the like just too text heavy. Urchin was a nice compromise but this looks nice. That's if I could access it. They had a maintenance notice up a little while ago.
Anthony - It took me 3 attempts to login this morning!!