Woopra Event Notifications Make Social Networking Interactive
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.
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:
- Visitor ID
- IP Address
- Tagged Visitors
- Country
- City
- Page URL
- Page Title
- File Downloading
- External link clicks
- Referrer URL
- Browser Type
- Platform
- Language
- Screen Resolution
So, how do event notifications help you stay on top of your social networking site? Well, imagine you run a social community and you want to know each time a new member signs up so you can give them a personal greeting and welcome them to the community. You also want to get other things done so you don’t have time to watch your email box all day waiting to get a new member signup notification.
In Woopra under the Manage tab on the left you can create a custom event notification that watches for the url of your member sign up page. When someone loads the page to join, Woopra will tell you. Then you can go and welcome the new member to the community and let them know that your glad they joined.
If you want to cut out false positives on the sign up form, set the alert to watch for the account confirmation page for your sign up process and then you’ll just get notifications when someone completes the registration process. It really depends on the system your using and whether or not you have access to the pages within the process.
This same concept can be applied to email list subscribers, promotional downloads, and partner link monitoring. The list of uses really is huge and the alert events are flexible enough that they could be used for just about anything.
Social networking is becoming a whole lot more interactive as it continues to mature and Woopra is bringing a whole new level of awareness to website management with tools like event notifications. Woopra makes it simple for bloggers, community builders, and general website owners to increase the level of interactivity they maintain with their visitors without adding complex programming to their startup costs.
Because event notifications are easy to implement and monitor, it is easy for you to run a promotion or have an idea and then test that idea quickly. This creates a fundamental shift in the way you react to events within you community.
Not only does it give you greater visibility into what is happening on your website, but it also helps you to take action in more proactive and organic ways.
Charles McKeever writes for his marketing blog, Charles McKeever of Open Source Marketer, where he helps new bloggers understand how to apply Internet marketing concepts to their blogs using tools and language that anyone can understand.
That is a great tip Charles! Thanks for sharing it!
This gives me all sorts of new ideas now. :-)
John
It’s so hard not to want to just watch my Woopra desktop all day long.
Charles & I joke that we’re going to hang a 60 inch flat screen monitor over the fireplace just to display the Woopra dashboard. Can you imagine?
What could be more romantic than sipping coffee and watching your blog traffic climb and getting notifications that you’ve made more money from someone joining one of your affiliate programs.
It’s way better than watching a stock ticker.
Hiya
Can I ask a quick question that I might be missing a simple solution to? Is it possible to be alerted when there is a new visitor on the site? What I mean by new is maybe not visited in the last few hours or something?
I turned on alerts to tell me when we got visitors to the homepage and the referrer was google, just as an example … but that then showed me the same visitors as they passed around the website and went via the homepage a number of times … which was terrible.
Hope you can help! I’m sure lots of other people might have asked this question of alerts too!
Thanks so far for a wicked product. The insight is wonderful
Regards
Mark over in sunny England
This is pretty sweet. Though I found a bug I think, I have setup multiple notifications and then has “Sounds enabled” so I would here it play when it notifies me.
After maybe around 10+ sound popping, it keeps on repeating and playing the sound notification, I then have no choice but to close woopra and re-login (then my notifications logs isn’t preserved)
Anyway, pls fix it and more power to you guys. Thanks :)
MarkHaller, that is a good question. I’ll have to look into it for you. Maybe John P and the crew can throw in on the answer. Be sure to ask it in the forum as well. I’m sure someone else has worked that out.
If you like the article and want to support Woopra give it some love on Digg. I’ve already submitted it.
Also be sure to Stumble it or whatever you do to social bookmark.
Long live Woopra,
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
@ markhaller:
If you watch Geekbrief.tv, you will see the Woopra map running in the background behind them. You aren’t the first with that thought, one we’re thrilled about.
fedmich: Remember to bring up these issues in the Woopra Forums where we have people monitoring bugs and issues and working to resolve them. If you post them here on the blog, they might get missed and your feedback is critical.
Jake: We’re working on the login issues, trying to cross between the membership, blog, and forums…trickier than one would think since they are three different programs.
As for the question about Mac, see:
I think there should option to show notification only when URL doesnt exist “X” word inside it (I want to include all URL except some).. That way I can create a rule just for some part of my website which is important for me..
I am so jealous! I can;t wait until I’m approved.. I run 11 sites and a decent size forum, this will be so cool and I imagine I will stare at stuff for the first few months :)
@ Jigar Mehta:
Make sure you mention this in the Feature Requests in the Forums so it will get counted. Thanks!
Hi!
My notifications not save, is correct?
Yesterday create 15 events notifications.
Today not events in my system.
how to save it?
Thanks.
@ Felipe:
Please direct your support questions to the Woopra Forums for faster help. I’ve not been able to recreate your problem but the support team may be able to help you solve this specific issue better.
[...] to combine the information gathered on several blogs (users of Woopra are already capable to share their stats-pages to other Woopra-users). If the number of participating blogs that share this information is large enough, it becomes [...]
Just want to say how ecstatic I am about using Woopra. I feel like the kid who finally learned how to ride a bicycle. It’s like the day I switched to Apple from The Evil Empire. Thanks for this great app, guys!
@ mathmojo:
We’re so gad you are enjoying it. We’re enjoying bringing it to you. Stay tuned for even more fun with the next beta release.
Social bookmarking has become one of the major methods of free promotion for websites. We would be crazy not to take advantage of such a huge means of promotions.
You should think about adding izeby.com to your list of social bookmarking sites.
[...] McKeever of Open Source Marketer, wrote about tracking visitor activity and using the Woopra Event Notifications to not just track visitors to test his social media marketing efforts. Submit an article to [...]