Woopra: Your Website’s New Best Friend
Posted by Dan on
September 10, 2008
After waiting about 20 days our sites finally got approved for Woopra beta. For those of you that don’t know what Woopra is, according to their website:
“Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. And it’s free!”
At this point, most small businesses that care about the statistics for their websites are using Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a great tool; I have been using it since our sites were launched. Woopra is better.
On the Desktop
One of the great things about Woopra is that it’s actually an application the resides on your computer. It is not a web-based application like Google Analytics. This allows them to be more visual, robust, and faster. Obviously the data is still stored on the Internet, but the interface is simply awesome!
Every User
Woopra tracks and displays the interaction of each site user. You can, at any point, look at all the people who’ve been on your site. You can see, at a glance, how many pages each of the users visited. Then, you can click each user and see exactly what they did while they were on your site. You can see what operating system and browser they’re using, their location, and how much time they spent on each page.
It’s Live
It’s great to see what people have been doing on your site, but it’s even better to see what they ARE doing. You can view, at any moment, how many people are currently on your site. Then, you can basically watch the user interact with your site. As soon as they click from one page to the next, you’ll see it. As soon as they leave, you’ll see it. One step, that still may be a bit creepy, is that you can spark a conversation with a live user. Using the live view, you just simply initiate a chat session and the visitor will get a popup with an opportunity to respond. I can see great uses for this, but I’m not sure how users will react to knowing people are watching.
Alerts
You can even set up alerts so that you are notified when people visit your site. You can be very general or specific about what you want alert for. Maybe you want to know when anyone visits your site, or maybe you want to know when someone from Portland, Maine that uses Firefox on a Mac visits your site. You have the software running on your desktop and when the user criteria is met, you will get a sound and/or visual notification. Then you can watch that user interact with your site.
Analytics
Besides being able to watch and track individual users, there are great analytics features too. You can use these tools to anlalyze, over custom periods of time, anything from where users are coming from to what pages on your site are most popular.
As far as I’m concerned, the only thing missing from Woopra is the site overlay. Of course CrazyEgg has Google beat on that front. It would be nice to be able to visualize in Woopra what links are getting clicked and what pages visitors are viewing.
I know this new website analytics tool will help me make changes to our sites that will improve the user experience. I’ll better know how users are responding to various aspects, and hopefully be able to make better decisions. You should sign up your site today. You’ll likely have to wait a while to get in, but it will be well worth it.
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