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.