Problem with Google Analytics and Urchin

In December, Google released a major upgrade to their Google Analytics tracking code, switching from the old urchin.js code and migrating to ga.js. While Urchin can still be used; the new ga.js code will have support for newer functionality.

Shortly after the new Analytics version was released we noticed that we were having poor reporting results from a website that was using Google Analytics. Using Apache's mod_proxy and Firefox's Live HTTP Headers tool we were able to see that the calls to Google Analytics were not being sent. When working properly you should see a GET request to google-analytics.com in the access logs or headers, something like:

 

http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmwv=4.1&...
GET/__utm.gif?utmwv=4.1&utmn... HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google-analytics.com

Debugging this problem was difficult until we discovered, as have others, that accessing the development website via a "localhost" URL caused the Google Analytics call to be suppressed.

With the "localhost" problem behind us we discovered that several of our analytics calls that had been working when we built the web application had silently stopped sometime over the past couple of months. We spent some time head scratching and trying to figure out what was happening in the Urchin code to prevent the calls from happening at all.

We finally decided to give up and just switch over to using the new ga.js code. That proved to be an easy transition and completely fixed the problem.

What actually caused the Urchin Analytics calls to stop working is still unknown, but if you are having unexpected problems with Google Analytics using Urchin, it might be worth it to upgrade to the new ga.js tracking mechanism.