This is a great question. Based on what we saw when we went to the GAAC conference in October Urchin is very much a going concern and an interest within Google. The primary reason for this is that Google is aware of the fact that the SAAS model used by Google Analytics won’t work for everyone. They are also aware of the fact that integration is often much easier when you use a server-based solution instead of a cloud solution. Urchin has a dedicated full-time development team and internal visibility.

The challenge for Urchin will be to have it stop being a “niche” product where privacy considerations are the main reason people select it, and more of an enterprise tool that allows extended and expanded integration features that are not available in Google Analytics for a variety of technical reasons. I think in the long run that is the direction the product is going to go.

* Google Analytics is only free for sites with less than 5 million page views per month (see http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55476)

There are a couple reasons why Urchin provides better visitor session / path analysis. One is that path reporting is comphrehensive (meaning you can see / browse all visitor paths if you’d like) whereas Google Analytics only gives you a limited snapshot of the most popular next pages and previous pages from any given page, through the Navigation analysis in the Content Reports.

Urchin also has a more sophisticated tracking mechanism that uses both the logfile and cookie information. Google Analytics has no access to logfiles to sync its session analysis with to insure accuracy.

Urchin is robust enough to overcome the effects of caches, proxies, and IP-recycling, all of which sometime distort the data in Analytics.

Thanks,

Dan