How To Configuring Urchin 6 Tracking To Analyze Website Logs

This is 3rd and the final installment for Urchin 6 web analytics software series. Once Urchin is installed, you need to configure tracking on your website. You need to install Urchin sensors – a small piece of javascript tracking
code on each of your website’s pages. Usually all large site uses some sort of templating (themes) system.

Step # 1: Copy UTM files to webroot

You need to copy or softlink urchin.js and __utm.gif file to webroot from /usr/local/urchin/util/utm directory. If your webroot set at /home/lighttpd/cyberciti.biz/, enter:
# cp -v /usr/local/urchin/util/utm/* /home/lighttpd/cyberciti.biz/
Set appropriate file permissions:
# chown apache:apache /home/lighttpd/cyberciti.biz/urchin.js
# chown apache:apache /home/lighttpd/cyberciti.biz/__utm.gif


Step # 2: Add tracking HTML JS code in the HEAD section

On each page of your website, place the following tracking code right after the any META tags in the HEAD section:

<script src="/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  _userv=0;
  urchinTracker();
</script>

Also make sure each website or profiles set to Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) as the visitor tracking method.

Step # 3: Make sure Apache logs data with cookies

You need to enable cookies in your Apache logging, add following code your httpd.conf file:

LogFormat "%h %v %u %t "%r" %>s %b "%{Referer}i" "%{User-Agent}i" "%{Cookie}i"" urchin

Find your domain <VirtualHost> entry for which you wish to enable this new logging format. Deactivate any existing TransferLog or CustomLog entries within a . Then insert the following new CustomLog entry, replacing the string path_to_log with the appropriate path to your log location:
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/cyberciti.biz/access.log urchin

A note about lighttpd web server

If you are using Lighttpd add following code to you lighttpd.conf file:

accesslog.format = "%h %v %u %t "%r" %>s %b "%{Referer}i" "%{User-Agent}i" "%{Cookie}i""

Save and close web server configuration file. Restart the server:
# service httpd restart
OR
# service lighttpd restart

How do I view reports?

Login to your account by visiting urchin admin url:
https://your.server.com:9999/
Click the Go To Report button to the right of each Profile Name to launch the reporting window for that Profile. The reporting window will allow you to view all available reports for the Profile i.e. website. Here is a sample report:

Fig.01: Urchin 6 Sample Report (click to enlarge)

Conclusion

This series has shown you how to install and configure Google Urchin 6 under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x. I suggest reading following section for more information.

Further readings:

• Urchin 6 help pages
• Google Urchin 6 home page