Why do I see a drop in my visitors when changing Visitor Tracking Method from IP + UserAgent to UTM?
It’s typical to see a drop in sessions when changing the way that Urchin tracks your visitor sessions. Although IP + UserAgent is a reliable method for tracking visitors, it still leaves a margin of “visitors” that aren t really visiting your site. This includes certain bots & spiders that are recorded in your log file. Also, when using the IP + UserAgent method, all the page hits on your website that are requested are recorded in the log file and added to the Urchin reports. This includes some pages that you would never think to tag with the UTM, like pop-ups. If you tagged every single page in your website with the UTM, then the results for using the IP + UserAgent method should be exactly the same as using the UTM method. However, if you don’t tag all of your pages with the UTM then you will start to see a drop off in the number of visits. Lastly, the timeout value that IP + UserAgent uses may not provide the best metric for measuring the lifetime of a visit to your site. The UTM us
