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.

Next to it is the Calendar, which can be customized to show the analytical data for today, yesterday, the last 7 days, or the last 30 days. A drop down menu allows you to quickly switch to these common time periods. To set the analytics for a specific time period, click on the arrows above the calendars to set the month, day, and year of your choosing. Click Apply Changes to set the time period. You can change it at any time.

You can also restrict the results displayed on the panels by quantity. By default, Woopra restricts the numbers to the top 250 within the time period set. You can change that to the top 20, 50, 100, or up to 1000, giving you more or less data as you need it.

Much of the data can be viewed as a bar graph, a chart, or you can export the data as a CVS file. Look for a set of three graphic icons in the upper right corner of the panel to switch between options. Also watch for mouseover events as you move through the data, changing charts and graphs and providing more information.

Let’s look at each of these areas briefly to help you understand how Woopra can help you learn more about your visitors.

Visitor Data

You can track the overall information about the visitors to your site through the live tracking of the Overview panel. It provides a summary of the visitors for that specific date, an average time spent on each page visited, the percentage of the total of visitors which are “new” to the site, the total number of visits, and the total number of pageviews.

At the end of each row of data is a gold bar with a percentage. Woopra tracks the date and number with the highest visitor and pageview counts and compares it to the rest of the statistics within the chart. The highest traffic date becomes 100 percent, and everything else a percentage thereof. As you move your mouse across the various statistics in the chart, the graph above changes to show you a graph comparing the numbers for each figure.

The Geo Overlay gives you visual representation of the planet. Hover your mouse over the various countries to see a count of the visitors from that country for the day. The Countries tab displays a listing of visits from specific countries by numbers and percentages of the whole.

The Members/Tagged Visitors panel lets you know if your return customers have returned, displaying the names of repeat visitors if they have left a comment or registered with your site. If you’ve tagged specific visitors using the Live > Tag This Visitor feature, they will also appear on this panel.

The Bounce Rate measures when a visitor leaves a page or the site without visiting any other web pages within a specific time. Woopra tracks the Bounce Rate by those visiting only one page and leaving, 1-5 pages, 5-10, 10-20, and more than 20 pageviews, giving you an idea of how many pages visitors explore before leaving your site.

The Visit Duration tracks the average viewing times of visitors to your site grouped by 0-5 minutes, 5-10, 10-20, and more than 20 minutes, helping you understand more about how long someone stays on your site. The percentages represent a breakdown of the total number of visitors.

System Data

The System panel breaks down the basic information about the system a visitor uses to visit your site, such as the type of browser, operating system (Platform), resolution, language, and the latest addition, Segmentation.

In the future, Segmentation will be featured more prominently within Woopra, allowing the user to compare and combine different data to find commonality and trends. Currently, segmentation is being tested to find commonality between Systems data.

By checking and selecting from the various options and dropdown menus, you can customize the information by browser, platform, resolution, and language, giving you an idea, for example of how many Windows XP users viewed your site with FireFox 3 as English speakers.

Pages Data

The Pages panel tracks the pages visited on your site, segregated by the most Popular Pages, Landing Pages, Exit Pages, Directories, Outgoing Links, Downloads, and Custom Events.

The Popular Pages panel gives you the most popular pages on your site based upon the specific time period set. Change the date range, and the data may change, giving you an idea of which pages are consistently most popular over a long time period, or just recently, helping you track page and content trends.

Knowing the top Landing Pages across various time periods not only shows you the trends, but also which posts are consistently attracting a lot of attention historically. These are typically gateways to your blog from search engines and incoming referrer links, so to other content within your site to encourage visitors to stick around and find out what other interesting content you have to offer.

A new feature, the ability to track directory and category specific data, is found on the Directories panel. If you have a static website or site which uses physical directories in the URL, or WordPress pretty permalinks or similar virtual categories or directories, Woopra will track these to show you metrics by directory and subdirectory. With pretty permalink text URL virtual directories, this makes the data more interesting.

A typical WordPress permalink structure is:

example.com/2008/04/26/article-title

A category or tag would be:

example.com/category/category-or-tagname/

Woopra’s Directory panel breaks these down as:

• 2008
• 04
• 06
• category
• category-or-tagname

Want to know how posts within 2007 are doing compared to 2008? What about posts within April or the “Woopra News” category? What about the “Woopra” tag?

Work still needs to be done on this new feature, since it can’t tell the difference between 04 the month and 04 the date, but it’s a step in an interesting direction.

Referrers Data

The Referrers panel helps you track where your visitors are coming from via the general Overview perspective, and a new range of features which breaks down the referral data by arrival from specific Web Pages, Regular Domains, Search Engines, Feed Readers, Email, Social Bookmarks, Social Networks, Media, and News.

Typical referrers stats break down referrers from a specific web, traditional domain sites like websites and blogs, search engines, and feed readers. Woopra can identify incoming links from popular email services, social bookmarking services, social networks, media sites, and news sites.

For example, if a visitor arrives from a link stored on de.licio.us, the popular bookmarking site, the referral would show under the Social Bookmarks tab. As would a visitor arriving from Digg. Someone coming from a referral on Blog Catalog, Meebo, or any other social network would be under the Social Networking tab. Has a news site recently covered a story with a link to your blog? It would show up under the News referral tab!

Woopra developers are adding new sites under each of the various referrer divisions, so stay tuned for more bells and whistles coming your way as Woopra develops.

If you would like to offer feedback and help Woopra improve, take advantage of the Woopra Forums and have your say.