Urchin 6 and Filters

Two Filters We Often Recommend:

Filters are applied to the information coming into your Urchin reports in order to manipulate the data and provide accurate reports. Filters can be set up to exclude visits from particular IP addresses, to report only on a sub-domain or directory, or to take dynamic page URLs and convert them into readable text strings.


First, we highly recommend creating a filter to exclude internal traffic from your Urchin reports as this data set isn’t an accurate representation of how your visitors are using your site.

To exclude internal traffic from your Urchin reports, follow these steps:

1 - Navigate to Configuration -> Urchin Profiles -> Filter Manager in the Urchin administration interface.
2 - Click the "Add" button to create a new filter.
3 - Choose "Filter Out Internal Traffic" from the "Select Example Filters" dropdown menu.
4 - Replace the sample IP address in the "Filter Pattern" box with the IP address you wish to filter out.
5 - Click "Finish".
6 - On the next window, click "More Options".
7 - Select all the Profiles you want to apply the filter to in the "Available Profiles" box, and then click the right arrow to transfer them to the "Applied To" box.
8 - Click "Update" to apply the filter to the selected Profiles.

Second, in order to ensure Urchin is not capturing unique page views as multiple pages due to different character cases being used, we highly recommend implementing this filter that forces the URI to lowercase.

As an example, Urchin will think “Default.aspx” and “default.aspx” are two separate pages, thus dividing pageview data.

Urchin has an advanced log setting that can force the URI to lowercase thus consolidating hits to the same page.

To force the URI to lowercase, follow these steps:

1 - Navigate to Log Manager in your Urchin GUI.
2 - Select a log source by clicking on the Edit icon.
3 - Click the "Advanced Settings" tab. There will be an option for "URI Stem to Lower Case". Select the "On" radio button. This will force all URIs in the reports to lower case, thus making the data uniform and easier to analyze.

Implementing these filters will help make the data in your Urchin reports uniform and easier to analyze, and more accurately represent visitor interaction with your website