7 Days of Urchin 7: Day 6 – Custom Reports & Data API

It’s been a while since our last post on Urchin 7. I’ve been busy at work working on with a client on a project involving…Urchin 7! But now that I’ve had some time, I’ve been able to get back on track with this series. So, to recap, what we’ve covered so far in this blog series.

1. An introduction to Urchin 7 and it’s features
2. My run through the upgrade procedure and how painless it really was
3. The performance of Urchin 7
4. Urchin 7’s new Advanced Segments feature and finally,
5. Event Tracking

Today, I’d like to cover custom reports and the updated data API.

Custom Reports

If you have ever created custom reports before in Urchin 6, you will know it’s not for the faint of heart. Sadly, the process of creating custom reports is still as painful as it was in Urchin 6. However, they have improved some of the features of custom reports. Now, you can have tabbed reporting and cross report drilling.

Tabbed Reporting

Tabbed reporting is great if you want to group a set of reports together that are related. One use case is creating a group of reports for one end-user so instead of having them click on reports in different sections of the navigation menu, they only need to view one report and switch between tabs.

Here’s a screenshot of a tab that I added to the “Top Content” report that filters for only pages that belong to the cat category. I could easily create another tab for pages that belong to the dog category. Thus giving an easily digestible set of tabs for pages by category. Whoever is using this report doesn’t have to remember to use the filter at the bottom to get the information they want.

Cross Report Drilling

This feature is a fairly cool feature. Before, report drill-down would only allow you to drill down within the same table. Thus, the maximum level of drill-down would be 5. Now, you can create a drill-down that goes across tables. One built-in example of this is the Event Tracking reports. The drill-down paths you can take are Categories -> Actions -> Labels, and each section in the path uses a different datamap table.

Data API v2

Urchin 7 also ships with a new, improved data API for automated data extraction. The improvements include:

• the ability to segment by visit, path and transaction
• the ability to specify up to 50 filters per query

I haven’t played around much with version 1 of the API, but from what I have done, there were some features that I wished for. One of them is addressed by the first improvement as there have been times when I have wanted to segment by the path or transactions completed but was not able to.

Stay tuned for the final installment in the series: Filters, Lookup Tables, & Customizable Geo-data

If you would like to read more about Urchin 7, please visit http://www.google.com/urchin.