woopra

Woopra Analytics reports offers a variety of data breakdowns, especially when it comes to referrer traffic. It’s critical you know where your traffic is coming from so you can direct your energies in new directions, or away from those that don’t work.

Many websites and blogs offer email announcements, alerts, notifications of new content, blog posts by email, and newsletter, but few analytics programs give a clear breakdown of the immediacy of the response to those emails.

In a recent email campaign, we tested the response with Woopra’s Live Map.

Tracking Email Response with Woopra Live Map feature

The Woopra Live Map is viewed in two ways, from within the Live Panel and expanded via the arrow in the upper right corner to a full screen view. The radar rings show real-time visitor activity, as well as the name of the web page they’ve landed on, and the referrer. By hovering the mouse over the dots, the location of the visitor is shown. If there is more than one visitor from a location, the mouse hover shows the number of visitors in parentheses.

Within in both views, you can click and drag to move the map, and scroll in and out on your mouse to zoom in or out for a closeup perspective on the Woopra Live Map. Watching the map live, you can also tell when one region is waking up and the other is going to sleep as the traffic shifts globally with the time zones.
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Hello fellow Woopra fans!

For over two years your Woopra team has worked tirelessly to build, refine, scale and support this new platform while overcoming the challenges associated with operating a service with a growth pattern that mirrors some of the biggest names on the Web. There is one significant difference however between Woopra and the other big names. Our business is privately funded, without a penny of venture capital investment. Yep, Woopra is a good old fashioned family business where the founders bet their own hard earned cash on the success of the idea.

I don’t mind telling you, two years of work is a long time to wait to see the fruits of your labor, and it’s a very long time to operate a business using your own money. It has been the strength and passion of the Woopra community that has driven – and continues to drive us – on to build the world’s greatest Web analytics platform.

As we approach the 100,000 Website mark, we are preparing – with your help – to take Woopra to the next level. As a result, it’s important that we involve every single member of the Woopra family in this next stage of our evolution.

I put together a short video to accompany my thoughts below. Before you watch it you must agree to the terms and conditions of the video:

1. I’m from Texas, so I talk slow. No making fun of me. :-)
2. I’m not much to look at, and I’m definitely not a pro. So don’t expect a Dave Courvoisier or Cali Lewis. (Both long time Woopra users by the way!)
3. Yes, that is my real hair. Yes, I have 3 monitors connected to my MacBook. And yes, I’m white as a ghost.

Now, on with the video!

The moment is here, and it’s now. You have two more days to sign up as a beta tester for Woopra. Please Sign up and add your site now or take this opportunity to add another.

We’re closing down this phase of beta testing of Woopra as of Sunday, September 20, 2009, as we’ve been warning everyone. By the end of the weekend, we’ll be doing a single batch approval of all sites registered at that time. This is your last chance to be one of the early testers of Woopra and have your say in how Woopra needs to evolve now.

Next week, we’ll be announcing the next phase of Woopra, and you are going to want to be a part of it. It’s very exciting, and many of you have been requesting this. We like making our members happy, so we’ve been putting in many long days and late nights to bring this exciting news to you…no peeking! You are going to have to wait.

We’ve been restricting beta testers to only two sites per person, but we’re opening the doors a little wider. You are welcome to add a few more sites to test drive Woopra, but don’t be too greedy. We’ve kept that restriction in place to allow the most number of people to help us test Woopra around the world, and have been rewarded by your incredibly generous feedback in the Woopra Forums and on @woopra.

We also want to thank everyone for being so patient with us during this phase of beta testing. This is the end of the wait times and approvals.

So tell your friends, family, and enemies that this is the last weekend to get in to test Woopra for free. You’ve got 48 hours. Go!

I’d like to tell everyone a story tonight. I hope you will all indulge an old man, and perhaps I can take your minds off whatever you are doing and amuse you for a little while.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the CEO here at iFusion Labs. What that counts for is really not much, because we all treat one another as equals. Truly. It really only means that on very rare occasions I’m called upon to be the tie-breaker, and maybe once I might have made a critical decision that went against the recommendation of the team. But one of the things I do have, and I suppose the reason that I am the CEO, is experience.

I had a fruitful career before starting Woopra with my partners Elie and Jad, and in that time I held fairly significant posts with large numbers of managers and staff at my command. Over the last decade I’ve worked with many hundreds of people, so what I’m about to tell you is significant. The team we have assembled here is one of the finest I’ve ever worked with in my life. I’m proud to be part of it, and I can’t imagine anything I’d rather be doing, or any people I’d rather be working with.
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The Woopra WordPress Plugin is now running on thousands of sites running Woopra. Created by Woopra co-founder Elie Khoury, it is now managed by Shane A. Froebel of Bug’s Site.

As a key player in Woopra development, Shane has a rare insider’s view of how Woopra works and how WordPress and Woopra can work together better. Over the past year, he’s worked hard to bring the Woopra WordPress Plugin into compliance with future versions of WordPress as well as expand it’s capabilities and functions.

I recently talked with Shane about his involvement and why Woopra is important to him.

Shane has multiple degrees in politics and history with two years studying IT at RIT. He lives in New York and, like so many, has had a long, unsatisfying experience playing around with various stats packages. He is a “self-credited PhD in Geekology” and one of Woopra’s favorite geeks. And trust me, don’t get him near Flash. He’s obsessed with Flash design.

Shane not only handles the Woopra WordPress Plugin but also the vBulletin Woopra Plugin and helps with support on the Woopra Forums and on the WordPress Support Forums. (more…)

As one of the first to offer affordable (currently free) live real-time stats and analytics, we are constantly asked if having real-time data is important. We thought we’d ask others to help us answer that question.

Care to join in with your thoughts on why real-time analytics matter?

Does Real-Time Analytics Matter?

In “The Case For Real-Time Analytics with Woopra” by V. Scott Ellis, he offers great examples of how to take advantage of Woopra’s real-time analytics to change your business strategies.

At an individual level we could watch people page by page as they navigated through the site, with information on where they came from, what search terms brought them there and we even had the ability to start a conversation with that person on the spot. But it wasn’t long after the initial joyous shock of feeling like you were looking at the bridge of a nuclear submarine before people started asking “what do I do with all that real-time information.”

We wanted to know, too. Recently I asked on the @woopra Twitter account why real-time analytics matter and and got some interesting feedback on how people use the real-time stats. (more…)

Wow! Today we had our first ever complete server failure. After two years of continuous operation, and with a whole slew of servers churning through over 500 million pieces of data daily, it was bound to happen! So I’m glad that is over with. Now, we have to fix it and move on.

The Summary

I’d rather give you the summary than bore you with the details, so let me just say that one of our “Engines” (that’s what we call the servers that do the heavy statistics gathering) had a RAID controller failure today, which resulted in the corruption of all of the data. This my friends, is about as much damage as can occur in a single server.

RAID is a technology we utilize in our servers that mirrors the data across multiple hard drives. This means that if you have one hard drive fail, there is a copy of the data on another, and the machine continues operating. Unfortunately, on rare instances you can have a controller failure, which damages the data on the drives. This is when you pray to the God of backups that you have another copy of the data elsewhere.
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