Tracking Visitor Activity With Woopra
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.
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.
This is extremely helpful if you are running a series of StumbleUpon campaigns and you want to know where the traffic goes once they arrive at your site.
I’ve done this on a couple occasions with Woopra. It’s extremely helpful to know when a StumbleUpon wave is happening, tracking it over its course, then recognizing when it is over.
I’ve watched a StumbleUpon visitor make their way across my blog, and I’ve been able to note traffic patterns that I might not otherwise have discovered without Woopra.
Woopra continues to amaze me as live statistics analytics program because it does all the things I actually want to do with my website analytics and not just what everyone else is doing.
Search Web Visitors’ History
Recently I said I wished that Woopra would show me the history of my website visitors and not just their stats while they were on my blog. I wanted to be able to analyze visitor patterns long after they were gone from my blog. I liked that Woopra showed me live stats, but when the visitor would leave my blog, the live updates disappear from the screen.
I did know that I could click the Analytics tab and run historical reports on most of the common statistics, but I really wanted to be able to revisit the steps each of my visitors took as they used my website.
Then I realized that I could click the Search tab and search for historical result by recent visitor and recent tagged visitors. This search gave me a list of visitors along with their page by page traffic history. Again Woopra amazed me.
Now I can pull back the historical data for visitors on my blog and look at their page by page click through details. I can even further refine the search by country, IP Address, Visitor ID, Visitor Name, Language, Browser, Platform, Screen Resolution, Page URL/Title, and Referrer/Keywords.
That means I can look at the traffic patterns of people on the Mac platform using Firefox browser from Romania and begin to build a profile that will tell me where I might need to make changes on my blog. It can also expose opportunities that I might not have been aware of previously.
Woopra is not just a tool to be tucked away in my toolbox for later use. It has become an organic part of my how I run my blog. It is as much a living breathing part of my online business as the visitors who click the links on my pages.
How has Woopra changed the way you do business?
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.
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Fantastic article, after I write this comment I will be exploring in detail these historical patterns. I know on my site http://www.scratchbuildersguild.com it is really cool to see a visitor first explore a review and quickly move to a 6 page article. I can see the visitor go to page 1 through 6 and thats a great thing to behold as how often do you read a 6 page article.
Well now I know, Thanks Woopra.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:34 am
you know what really misses from this section? Time each visitor spent on the site. And also some don’t have a referrer.
otherwise it’s pretty cool.
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:12 pm
@eydryan:
Nice idea, we will have that implemented in the next release.
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I don’t know if it is allowed but it would be nice to know what ad a visitor has clicked on - not ad group, but the single ad clicked on.
June 3rd, 2008 at 4:39 pm
@ goldcoaster:
We’re working on a whole ecommerce feature, so stay tuned on that. And please make your feature request known in the Woopra Forums so we can track it better.
June 6th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Is there a way to know, in blogger, if a visitor left a comment on a post?
June 7th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
@ nanopoder:
Are you asking if there is a way to know if a visitor has left a comment on Google’s Blogger or within Woopra? Or when using Woopra with Blogger?
June 10th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Lorelle, I´m asking it there is a way to know if a visitor has left a comment on Google´s Blogger (using Woopra software in the desktop).
I mean, I´m trying to identify who enters my blog, so I could see a comment and search who recently were in that particular post and left a comment. Am I clear?
Thanks!
June 10th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
@ nanopoder:
I don’t know about Blogger, but I know that work is underway to alert WordPress users when a comment has been made on WordPress blogs. Hopefully, someone will add that feature to a script especially for Blogger. Thanks for clearing that up.
June 15th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
What are the possibilities of getting Woopra to give us the State or Region. It is nice that you give the Country and City but the State or Region along with the given data would be a big help in tracking visitors.
June 17th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
@ exotic dancer:
Work on such data is ongoing, so expect to see that available in future versions. To ensure your feature request gets attention, please post it to the Feature Requests section in the forums where all requests are tracked. Thanks!
August 8th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Lemme Ask,
I see alot of talk about showing traffic and where people go on the site. Does Woopra track flash applications as well? I have a new site that I have almost complete to start selling to spefic advertisers. But I want to be able to show traffic on the flash, forum, gallery and custom pages that were created.
Here is a link to the site so someone can look at it and tell me if Woopra would be a viable option for me. Currently I have GA. I am not at all thrilled with the level of detail that it covers. Plus it doesnt seem to track all the areas I mentioned above.
http://www.tatznw.com
August 9th, 2008 at 1:48 am
@ deathdlr:
We will be documenting how to track Flash and other features in Woopra very soon. This is something Woopra is capable of, so stay tuned for news on that.
Woopra may be a viable option for you and for anyone interested in web statistics and analytics at all levels. Right now, you have free access to the beta version, which is shifting and changing as part of the program’s development. Please see How to Help Woopra and Woopra Members on the Forums for tips on participating in the Woopra forums. We are eager for your unique perspective and feedback to help make Woopra better.
August 9th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Thanks Lorelle, I appreciate the information. Cant wait to gain access. I am so excited I might just pee… oh crap.. NM, I am now not as excited as I thought…heheheh