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Woopra Provides Real-Time Site Use Tracking

July 16, 2010 Webmaster 5 Comments

Woopra does for your website the same thing that Google Analytics does, it provides insight to your visitors and audience helping you learn how they ended up on your site and what they’re hoping to get out of it. By using analytics, hopefully you can tune your website to give your visitors what they’re looking for more easily. I’ve tried Google Analytics before but somehow Woopra works for me where as Google Analytics just didn’t tell me anything useful. Between the WordPress.com Stats I was already getting, I didn’t need another static analytics package adding more Javascript to my page. Woopra, on the other hand, processes its information and sends it to your dashboard so you get real-time website analytics. You can see that somebody just visited your site or is visiting your site, how they got there, where they’re from, what page they’re looking at, and all the other usual analytic metrics.

Google now provides a browser add-on that allows web consumers to opt-out of being included in Google Analytics. NoScript or disabling Javascript in the browser will also negate most analytics from tracking you. While GA is becoming less relevant, Woopra is swooping in and filling a niche that wasn’t being addressed before by providing analytics in real-time. Woopra also provides a desktop client to interface with your reports as well as a web interface.

Installation of Woopra to monitor your site consists of copying a simple line of Javascript just before the closing ‘body’ tag in your theme or pages.

The web interface is a new feature that still carries the beta tag but works very well. It is recommended that you use Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox for your best response time. Woopra also has a cool feature that allows you to initiate a chat with your visitors for more in-depth usability studies. You can change a setting on the Woopra site that allows your visitors to initiate a chat with you (or other users elected to manage your site) which could make for a decent feedback or customer assistance channel.

Woopra is free but has limitations. With the free version, you get up to 30,000 page views each month and data retention of 3 months. On the desktop client, you’ll also see ads on the side. If you step up and pay for the service, you’ll get higher limits with the cheapest starting at $5 a month. Right now I’m using the Basic (free) version and it’s very sufficient but with the quality of the product I’m considering paying the $5 a month for a better view.

Check out Woopra
for a new way of conducting your analytics studies and gaining perspective that could help you improve your website and indirectly your site traffic.

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Jason Hamilton is an IT Professional in his full-time job and operates 404 Tech Support LLC in his spare time from Central Illinois. Send us a story suggestion with the Contact Page.

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http://www.Rarst.net Rarst

GA becoming less relevant, huh? As for me it is still one of the most comprehensive and flexible analytics solutions, available for free on top.

I’ve used Woopra while back. It makes killer first impression, but after some time I was in “so what” mode. Real time mode is nice for eye-candy but useless for anything practical. What exactly does staring at visitors in real time accomplishes?

Dashboard client is again – nice eye-candy. But with GA I can login anywhere and install nothing. Again – what purpose exactly large and heavy desktop clients serves…

PS I used it considerable time ago, so things might have changed since

PPS I think Blogger accounts already have beta of new GA interface with real-time eye-candy… matter of time before it gets to everyone I think
http://www.404techsupport.com/ Jason

As more and more people choose to install the GA opt-out plugin, you’ll start getting less and less than 100% of your traffic in your data. GA didn’t strike me as telling me anything really new when I first looked at it because I already get the very basic daily stats with the WordPress.com Stats plugin. The cost in performance for the additional Javascript didn’t seem worth it at the time. It’s also been a while since I’ve tried using GA.

I’m sure as you’re well aware, writing a blog about technology, our audience tends to be more tech savvy than the average person. They’re more likely to have Ad-Block, NoScript (which will also block GA and Woopra), and possibly this GA opt-out add-on. This makes our ad impressions artificially lower and Google Analytics providing less than the complete picture of our audience.

I agree with you that the desktop client is a less friendly format for on the go and Woopra must agree because they’re actively developing the web version. With HTML 5 and modern browsers, it seems they’re able to get the responsiveness they want from a web interface. They launched the new web interface just last month, June 2010, and it got a considerable face lift. However, it seems there are plenty of people that disagree with us and use Woopra solely because it has a desktop client.
There’s some more info about it written up on their blog: http://www.woopra.com/blog/

I agree that mostly the real-time aspect is eye-candy but I think it does also add a new attribute of analytics though: Acceleration. It was interesting for me to watch my real-time analytics yesterday and see how quickly people started coming to read the article after it was published. I could tell some keywords were being picked up by the Google real-time results and people started coming to my page from Google just a minute after I had published.
http://www.Rarst.net Rarst

>They’re more likely to have Ad-Block, NoScript (which will also block GA and Woopra), and possibly this GA opt-out add-on.

Well, as you note yourself sword cuts both ways. Woopra is almost as likely to be blocked as GA. I mean I have Woopra blocked myself (it drives me crazy that their script keeps resetting page unread indicator in browser).

>It was interesting for me to watch my real-time analytics yesterday and see how quickly people started coming to read the article after it was published.

Well, these are fresh impressions. Use it for few months and it gets boring.

I have nothing bad to say about Woopra (except that damn indicator reset but I think it is hyped by techies for eye candy and marketing speak (real time!) rather than killer features. Anyway I used it in early, beta and it seems to be still in beta… Things can change.

PS try to find some time and really dig in GA… There is enormous amount of information and ways to slice it in there.
http://www.woopra.com/ Lorelle

Thank you for the great review. We do not consider us competitors to Google Analytics as they are apples to our oranges. And thanks for noticing the hard work we are constantly doing to upgrade things under the hood. The improves in the web version, as well as event notification and segmentation filters and searchers (paid versions), as well as the live chat, are really important to us and invaluable to our members.

As for the issue mentioned in the comments, this is the first I’m hearing about it. Rarst, have you reported this in the Woopra forums? Would love to know more there about the issue so we can help with it. Might be something goofy with your Woopra JavaScript. We updated that about a year ago during the final months of our beta time period and maybe you are still using the older script.

We’re working on advanced ecommerce and campaign tracking features to be released soon, and always working on making things better. Thanks again for your support and feedback. You are what helps us makes Woopra better.
- http://www.Rarst.net Rarst
  
  I didn’t mean that only my page was resetting unread indicator. Every site that had Woopra at time was doing that. I opened some page to read later and it would constantly show as unread, even if I looked through it.
  
  Anyway it was while back and I am not much interested by now.