Do you really know where your search traffic is coming from?

On the Woopra Dashboard > My Searches panel section, Woopra shows you live the search terms people are using to arrive on your site from search engines as well as what users are searching for on your site.

In the Analytics > Referrers > Search Engine panel, there is a breakdown of your referral traffic from search engines. In the upper right corner of that panel section is a pie chart button. Click it to get another view of your search engine traffic in the form of a pie chart.

There is an overwhelming myth that the majority of search engine traffic comes from Google. Does it? Have you checked lately? Does the majority of your search traffic really come from Google or somewhere else?

To get a better feel of where your traffic is coming from, change the calendar overview. Click on the date range on the Calendar feature to look at the numbers over time.

It’s easy to say all your traffic is coming from Google, but where specifically? Google offers a variety of search systems. Is your traffic coming directly from Google the search engine, Google the image search, Google the Blog Search. or Google the news search?

Is a good portion of your traffic not coming from Google.com but Google.co.nz or Google.co.il? Do you know what those are? They are the various language and country specific Google search engines. NZ is New Zealand and IL is Israel.

Knowing which Google search engine people are using can change your perception of your blog audience.

In the Search panel, run a search filter using images.google in the Referrer/Keywords form and compare that number with the total you have in the search engine referrers? What percentage is it? Do the same with blogsearch.google to see where people are actually coming from within the Google empire.

Don’t forget that images.google.com restricts your search to only those using the dot com. By removing the domain extension, you can pick up international versions of Google, which end in co.uk, co.jp, and so on, such as images.google.co.uk.

Any surprises? Is Google not the king of search referrers for your site? Or does Google still rule your site? Does knowing which search engines bring traffic to your site change things? What will you do differently?

We asked you what statistics confuse you the most and got some interesting answers. Now, we want to know what analytic information do you really need to help you manage your website or blog.

Web analytics and statistics programs offer you a lot of numbers and analytics, ways of combining or separating the numbers to help you analyze them and make decisions for your website and blog. However, not all analytical programs give you the information you need to really help you understand your audience and how to be serve them, as well as how to expand your audience by understanding what the numbers and trends tell you.

What analytical information do you really need for your blog or website? What are you getting and what are you not getting?

In other words, what do you really want to know about your audience? And can a web analytics program really give you the information you need?

A record was broken for me recently on the Woopra Forums. A Woopra member was having trouble with Woopra not working properly and a quick validation check of their XHTML code found 3,510 Errors, 359 warnings, a new record for validation errors in my book.

If Woopra isn’t working right, if you are not getting the Woopra desktop client or web app to track your site, if the numbers are messed up, or you are getting errors on your site which you would like to blame on Woopra, please take a moment to validate your site’s code to ensure that there is nothing getting in the way of Woopra’s JavaScript doing it’s job.

While Woopra is still in beta testing, and things still go bump in the statistical night, let’s rule out site code errors first so we can dig deeper into resolving the real issue with Woopra.

If you are unfamiliar with how to validate your site’s code, here are some basic steps.

1. Go to The W3C Markup Validation Service or one of the validation sites listed below.
2. Type in the full URL/Address of your site.
3. Click the submit button.

Or you can install the Web Developer or Firebug Firefox Extensions for Firefox, or something similar for other web browsers, that will automatically help verify code semantic issues.

The resulting report usually contains links to help you problem solve the errors and issues. Once these are resolved, check Woopra again to see if it is working properly. If not, please report the issue in the Woopra Forums after you search for a solution. Let us know you’ve validated the site.

Validating your site’s code has more benefits than just getting it to work with Woopra. Search engines can move through your site quickly and easily with clean code. Pages will render better across most browsers making it easier for people to access and read your site. And Google’s PageRank loves clean code and rewards it.

Validate your site’s code after making any significant changes or on a regular basis to make sure nothing has crept in that could be causing problems under hood. Consider it part of a regular site tune up.

Site Validation Tools

• The W3C Markup Validation Service
• W3C’s Collection of Validators
• WDG HTML Validator
• The W3C CSS Validation Service
• Validating an entire site from Standards-schmandards
• Total Validator
• WordPress Codex - Validating a Website Tips and Tools

There are a lot of statistics that can be gathered from your website and blog users. Some are obviously informative, such as the top posts and number of visitors. Others are more vague as to what these numbers mean and how you can use them to help you make decisions about your traffic, content, design, and business.

However, there are a lot of numbers that people are having a hard time understanding. We want to know: Which numbers make you scratch your head?

This isn’t just about the numbers shown in Woopra but what web analytics numbers do you have a hard time understanding or knowing what to do with them? How do you use them? Why are they important? And why are they important to some webmasters and not others?

We’ll soon be offering some basic tutorials in how to use Woopra and web analytics, so we’re curious about what statistics confuse you the most?

We’re working long hours on fixing up and putting the final touches on Woopra 1.3. We just released RC2 and may have another Release Candidate as we recently incorporated a lot of new features in the 1.3 release. The feedback in the Woopra Forums and around the web has been incredible. It is very stable for most users, and people are really enjoying the new features, faster speeds, and improvements.

We are pouring through all of the reports and feedback on the Forum, tracking down those little details and issues that came with the complete rewriting of the Woopra code. We expect Woopra 1.3 to be our most stable and easy-to-use version yet, mostly due to your tremendous input.

We will be opening up approvals very soon as we move into the final stage of releasing the next version and set up new servers coming soon.

We’ve also added more installation tips and add-ons to help you install Woopra on a wide variety of systems and platforms. We’re working on screenshots and videos to help you learn even more about how to use Woopra. And we’re thrilled about the great feedback and reviews Woopra is getting.

We’re also working on a new design for the website, improving navigation and expanding our documentation to help you learn more about how to use Woopra. There is a lot going on behind the scenes!

Here’s more specifics and some more Woopra news you can use. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks again to everyone who has been testing the new Woopra 1.3 release candidate, and we appreciate all of the feedback. Today we’re releasing the second, and final release candidate before the forced mass upgrade from the 1.2 release.

This new release candidate is a highly recommended update for everyone running 1.3 RC1, and it’s also much more stable than the 1.2 release so if you’ve been having any problems on 1.2 you may wish to download and manually install this update.

New Features:

New Features

• This release adds a new theme editor which adds the ability to create your own themes
• In addition to the ability to create themes, we’ve added a new Woopra Light Theme
• The final 1.3 release will include the ability to share themes with the community, so get your themes ready for sharing!
• A new Quick Stats feature resides at the top, and this functionality will be expanded prior to the final release.

Read the rest of this entry »

As announced, Woopra is celebrating the addition of more than 8,500 new Members to the Woopra family, and preparing for the second release candidate of Woopra 1.3 Beta (video).

Testing continues on the new Woopra Web Analytics, and your feedback is welcome and critical to helping to improve the web application version of Woopra.

We published some of the early reviews of Woopra 1.3 Beta, and more are coming in every day as we move closer to the stable release. We wanted to share some of those with you, and some more Woopra news worth celebrating!
Read the rest of this entry »

As of today, we’re closing the approval round having added over 8,500 new beta testers to total 60,000 registered and active Woopra Members monitoring almost 70,000 registered websites. Wow!

It’s time for a celebration!

Welcome to all our new Woopra Members!

As announced recently, we originally planned on approving 5,000 beta testers in this current round of approvals. By the end of last week, we’d approved over 7,000 and decided to let a few more people in for the Woopra fun.

We’re celebrating with the release of Woopra 1.3 Release Candidate 2 in a few days, following up on the tremendous input from our Members on the Woopra 1.3 RC1 Desktop Application and brand new Woopra Web Analytics, a web app view of your site’s stats and analytics including the integration of the Google Maps API for a live view of visitors by street, satellite, and hybrid views.

As we close down approvals to put all of our energy and focus into the next version of Woopra and incorporating your tremendous feedback, you can still sign up for Woopra. We may be approving another round with the release of the stable version of Woopra 1.3 Beta in a few weeks.

You can stay with the stable Woopra 1.2 Beta. We will automatically upgrade the Woopra desktop client when we release the next stable version.

For a peek at the new features, see the feature list for Woopra 1.3 RC1, a video introduction of the new version, or read what others have been saying about the next version of Woopra.

Your help testing the Woopra 1.3 Release Candidates is welcome and appreciated. Check the list of things you need to know about the Release Candidates known issues. Your help reporting on bugs and issues, and offering a few woops and compliments, in the Woopra Forums is very welcome. If you are unsure as to how to help us improve Woopra, check out How to Help and How to Help Woopra and Woopra Members on the Forums.

Thanks again to all the new Woopra Members joining us. Remember, if you are a proud Woopra user, why not help spread the word with a Woopra badge.

Vladimir Prelovac, author of the WordPress Plugin Development Beginner’s Guide, recently reported he had a near perfect analytics day.

Perfect analytics with all three sources of traffic being equal.

What’s so great about it?

The traffic sources are equally spread.

In the chart on his site, it shows traffic sources as 34% direct, 30% referrers, and 35% search engines. He says:

…by distributing the traffic among referral sites (which means you make good content that people link to), and investing in the user experience (again you make good content so they will come back) you have secured your site against virtually all Internet turmoil - which is the way to run in it the long run.

For some people, they would not look at the breakdown of stats this way. For some, a perfect analytics or stats day would be a giant jump in traffic. For others, it’s a fast and consistent growth upward. Still some want more referrals than search engines, and others are pleased with a ton of search engine traffic and don’t care about direct or referral traffic.

What would define your near or totally perfect analytics or stats day? What analytics do you depend upon to give you a day-by-day accounting of where you are with your site and business online?

You can quickly change the color schemes for each site you are monitoring in Woopra by clicking on the Site Tab arrow. A drop down menu will appear, giving you a chance to change the tab name and choose the color scheme for that site.

When monitoring multiple sites in Woopra, it helps to tell at a glance which site you are watching the live stats and checking your Analytics on. There are currently 12 different color schemes to choose from, with more on the way in upcoming versions of Woopra.

As you click on the color options, Woopra will show you a preview of that color scheme. To choose that color, either click on the drop down arrow or click away from the menu.

Read the rest of this entry »