woopra

I would love to recruit some of our Wooprites to do a little testing if I could.

John P’s been running Woopra over on his blog along with a slew of other tracking scripts (don’t know why he hasn’t removed the others yet – we’ll give him a hard time!), and he’s been asking me why Woopra performs so much better than Google Analytics. This topic has come up in Forum discussion’s as well, and I thought I’d do a little more testing to try and verify a hypothesis.

In that discussion, it has been noted in reports from 3 separate people that Woopra is catching a much larger number of visitors than Google Analytics (please go add your results too). No one seems to know why though. So I did some research using the Firebug plugin along with FireFox to gather some real performance data on Woopra vs. Google Analytics, P-Metrics, and MyBlogLog – all of which are installed on John P’s blog.

Here is what I found:

This is the first of an ongoing series of guest articles which explore web analytics and using Woopra. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact Lorelle at Woopra.com with your proposal.

By Charles McKeever

Tracking exactly where your visitors go on your website is extremely valuable information. You would think that most modern analytics packages would give a detailed page by page report of visitor activity, but they don’t.

With most analytics packages you can pull out your most popular pages, average visits, average time spent on site, and other very useful details, but there really isn’t any easy way to create a direct correlation to what path a specific visitor took once they entered a website. That is until Woopra was released.

Woopra is fantastic for showing live statistics from your website as they happen. As a visitor clicks from page to page, you can watch in real-time as they make their way into your site. Woopra also tells you how long the visitor was on a specific page.

As you watch visitor traffic, you have the benefit of the opportunity to take note of traffic patterns in real-time. That means you can see that there is an issue with a particular area of your website and take action to create a solution to get a desired result.
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As announced, the latest version of Woopra includes some new segmentation features which helps track referrers, browser types, platforms, screen resolutions, and languages. Let’s look at some of the analytics and new segmentation features, which gives the user the ability to divide up the blog’s metrics into specific groups or segments that share common characteristics.

On the Analytics Panel, you have the following menu tab choices:

• Visitors: Tracks the visitors on the site by a general Overview, Geo Overlay, Countries, Members/Tagged Visitors, Bounce Rate, and Visit Durations.
• System: Tracks Browsers, Platforms, Resolutions, Languages and Segmentation.
• Pages: Tracks specific web pages and how they are visited and accessed by Popular Pages, Landing Pages, Exit Pages, Directories, Outgoing Links, Downloads, and Custom Events.
• Referrers: Tracks referrers by general Overview, Web Pages, Regular Domains, Search Engines, Feed Readers, Email, Social Bookmarks, Social Networks, Media, and News.

As you examine each panel within the Analytics of Woopra, the live data is paused while you examine and explore the metrics within. To update the live data within the panels, click the Refresh Data button at the top of the panels with the tabs.
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Just as a quick update, we are in the process of approving a few thousand more users, so many of you will be receiving access to Woopra over the next few days.

For those of you who don’t receive access in the next 72 hours, please know that we’re working through the backlog as fast as possible while we prepare more infrastructure for the job of reliably tracking your Web site, and I’ll drop routine updates on the blog here to keep you up to speed on how things are coming.

My rough guess is that we’ll be doing a large number of additional approvals within a week of completing this current batch.

Thanks again everyone! And we’re really looking forward to reading those reviews from the folks who just got approved! Please let us know what you think!

The past five weeks since Woopra was first announced at WordCamp Dallas, it’s been a whirlwind. There have been tens of thousands of applications for a Woopra invite, and an invite was even sold on ebay recently. There are videos and podcasts showcasing Woopra, and the reviews are honest and, luckily, very kind.

Several new updates of Woopra have come out in the past five weeks, with another one due very soon, bringing with it not just bug fixes but some very exciting new features. The Woopra Sharing Access feature was just released and there are some great bells and whistles that should be in the next few releases. Get excited, folks. Woopra is getting better all the time.

General Woopra News You Can Use

John Pozadzides is running a contest called “My Woopra is Bigger Than Yours” on his personal blog inviting Woopra fans to post their Live numbers to try to beat his new record of 1,352 live visitors. Do you think you can beat that? Show off your live stats!

More than 10,000 approvals have been issued, and the waiting list is growing steadily. We need beta testers to report in and help us improve Woopra, so check in on the Woopra Beta Testers Check-In forum post and let us know how Woopra is working, or not working, for you in Bug Reports and other related sections in the Woopra Forums. Your help is much appreciated.
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Tyner Blain recently interviewed Woopra’s John Pozadzides about Woopra and the current publicity and approval issues, how Woopra works, and what’s in store in the future.

One of the key things John said in the interview is the amazement and challenges the entire Woopra team feels at the sudden popularity and attention:

Our biggest hurdle is clearly scaling the project quickly enough. We have tens of thousands of user requests in just a few weeks, and in less than 5 weeks the Woopra.com site went from practically no links to over 500,000 in Google, so the number of incoming requests continues to accelerate.

Luckily, with the amazing support of Layered Technologies and 3Tera to provide additional servers, we’re working on the scalability issues. We know Woopra is good and we’re eager to get access to everyone who wants it, so thanks for your patience as the Woopra team works hard to finish the initial beta test and moves towards a first release candidate.

This is the first of an ongoing series of guest articles which explore web analytics and using Woopra. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact Lorelle at Woopra.com with your proposal.

By Charles McKeever

Building a social networking community is a lot of hard work. To really make it work and make people feel like there’s someone on the other side of their monitor you have to stay on top of welcoming new members, responding to discussions, being aware of new groups, commenting on new photos and videos, and responding to support requests.

It’s true that alerts for all these events can be programmed into a system, but that takes time and money. You could use some form of email system to track what’s going on in your community, but using email to respond to requests can be tedious. Unless you have to be in your email all day, it isn’t very productive and certainly not all that interactive.

What I’ve discovered is that Woopra provides a crazy simple solution to staying on top of activity in my social networking site with event notifications.

Using Woopra’s Event Notifications

Woopra’s event notifications let me set alerts for when certain events happen on my website. An alert can be a sound, a custom on screen message, or both.

Alerts can be set by visitor identification, pages and referrers, and system specifications. This makes it very simple to track when community members are online, when new forum discussions, new groups, new photos, new videos, and new comments are added.

Event notifications also gives a real-time way of knowing when someone comes from a particular country or city. If community members are sensitive to certain time zones then this can be extremely helpful, especially when trying to build a community with an international member base.

Woopra event notifications are extremely flexible and offer a great way to stay interactive on your websites.

Here are the events you can flag within Woopra’s event notifications:
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We’ve had a lot of excitement in the last week with Woopra, so let me start with a recap of some notable events.

• We completed the mass approvals process early this week and now have well over 10,000 folks Whoopin it up!
• Great news for Mac users, Java for Mac OSX was finally released. It only runs on 64bit versions, so if you have an older machine your best option is still to run Woopra in Windows under Parallels.
• Lorelle announced a new series of weekly Forum discussions called Woopra Weekly. The first topic this week is “What do the numbers mean to you?” I’m really looking forward to these weekly discussions to better learn how to utilize information to more effectively drive my readership.
• Our friends at RocketTheme released Woopra plugins for Joomla versions 1 and 1.5.
• We released the brand new Woopra Sharing Access feature which allows users to grant access to their site statistics to other users. This feature has been highly requested, and it works great! I’m really enjoying it myself…
• I learned that the spam filter in the Forums was going nuts! There were a ton of comments marked as spam and not one of them was. So hopefully I’ve taken care of the problem, but it’s funny that no one complained!
• Meanwhile, we passed the 1,000 posts mark in the forums (up to 1,150 actually)! Considering there are only a small number of us, we still need everyone’s help to answer the newbie’s questions and help keep the forums friendly and open.

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Woopra Sharing Access (WSA) is a new feature that we have just released for testing.

Woopra Sharing Access is very useful for those who want to show their website activity to their advertisers, other Woopra members, co-authors on multiple blogger sites, and more.

Where else can this feature be useful? What about communities or networks of blogs. We run Woopra on Woopra to track all our fans’ activities, and to help us put Woopra to the test. Most members of our development team have Woopra running on their personal sites, including John Pozadzides’s One Man’s Blog, my Elie El Khoury blog, and Lorelle’s blogs. We use each others’ blogs to test Woopra – especially before all our new members started appearing with the premature release of Woopra invitations, who are now helping us find all the bugs we missed among our few testing sites! Thank you.

The point is that we all work together, so we can now share our website traffic information with each other, since we are part of our own community and team. This isn’t a feature for everyone, but it is great for those who want and need to track more than one site and want to share their Woopra statistics. We’re sure you are going to come up with even more reasons to use Woopra Shared Access – and we expect you to share them with us.
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