woopra

Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor, one of the world’s leading experts in web analytics and author of one of my favorite web analytics books, “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day,”wrote an article called “Web Analytics Career Advice: Play In The Real World!” that is a slap in the face of everyone working on the web today.

He specifically addresses the challenges he faces interviewing job candidates for positions as analysts, marketers, PPC specialists, and other “data jobs” as he calls them. He says it is frustrating and depressing how many are really not qualified in his sense of the word.

Usually they are “qualified”. The depression comes from this singular flaw: The candidate’s education is limited by the companies they work/worked at.

All I know is ecommerce because that is all my company does.
All I know is lead gen because that’s my world.
All I know is PPC because my job involved just Search.
All I know is B2B because that’s my company’s vertical.

These are summaries of the excuses I hear. They don’t actually use their words, but it takes 10 mins of questions for that essential summary to emerge.

These excuses are extremely corrosive and and sadly indicate how the candidates have allowed their environment to limit their full potential, stunt their professional growth.

He’s right. We often let the limitations and restrictions of our company prevent us from expanding our knowledge and abilities. We also do it to ourselves. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve presented workshops and training programs on web analytics, social media, and blogging only to hear, “There’s just too much information. I only want to know what I need to know. Nothing more.”

When you live inside the box, you miss the world passing you by. You miss what’s going on right now, and now is important. Especially as we move into a real-time world where decisions happen in the now, not the later.
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At Woopra, we routinely perform assessments of our infrastructure in order to ensure that we are building our systems in a manner that will provide the highest performance for our members.

A key element of the Woopra delivery model is our use of a system called a CDN, or Content Distribution Network. A CDN is comprised of a globally distributed system of computers that mirror content in multiple geographic regions, plus a special routing system which directs end users to the closest local server from which they can download a file.

CDNs are important for services like Woopra since we monitor billions of page views per month and each one requires that a JavaScript be downloaded from our network. Without a CDN, all traffic would have to come back to our main servers located in Dallas. With the CDN, users in Japan can download files from Japan, Germans can get it from Germany, and New Yorkers can get it from New York. This efficient system for routing results in increased performance and reliability across the network.

Woopra was previously partnered with a CDN provider called Panther Express, which was fairly recently acquired by another company called CDNetworks. They had been responsible for serving billions of JavaScript downloads since the beginning; however a recent series of events led us to swap providers for a more reliable, better performing partner called EdgeCast.
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Hello to everyone out there in Woopra Land!

We’ve been very busy lately listening to your suggestions and taking action on them! As a result I’m pleased to tell you that, Woopra is open for free registrations. No invite necessary…for now.

In the past couple of weeks since we announced that we were coming out of beta and that our new billing system was online, we had our registrations closed down and no one was able to add sites to the system for tracking.

During that time we also had thousands of new registrations. It seems that most people were looking to give Woopra a try on the basic (free) plan first but hadn’t yet been able to add a Website to the system.

As you might imagine, this meant that the team and I have been inundated with hundreds of requests to bring back the free registrations, even though I did mention that our intention was to wait until the business was at a cash-flow break even point before adding additional free users.

After talking it over with the team, we have decided that we’re going to open up free registrations without an invitation for now. We have some spare capacity on the systems, and we’re going to be ordering more soon.

Please keep in mind that this is the first time Woopra has ever allowed unrestricted signups. We really don’t know what is going to happen, and therefore we’re reserving the right to stop new additions at any time.
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You know what? Why is everyone treating “real-time” as if it’s something special? It’s not. It’s how I live my life, and I’m willing to put money on the fact that you do too.

When I’m talking to a friend face-to-face I don’t say something and then wait for an hour (or a day) for a response. The conversation happens as a steady flow. If you really think about it, the world would come to a crushing halt if everything happened at the “speed of the Web”.

That is so “Web 2.0″ isn’t it? Didn’t IBM have a commercial comparing faxes to emails or something? Well, guess what. The reason Woopra exists is that for at least a few of us, the Web sucked and everything was way, way too slow.

Now, it’s not like I’m asking anything to “speed up”. I don’t want to watch videos in double-time or anything. But I think that real-time equates to just-in-time, and frankly it’s the speed I’m comfortable with.
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Well, the day has finally come. It simultaneously feels like its been both forever, and just yesterday, since we started developing Woopra. Today, I’m happy to announce the beginning of Woopra General Availability!

Let’s talk a little about what that means.

• It doesn’t mean that we’re perfect, but it does mean that we are not going to hide behind a Beta badge forever like some services seem to want to do. The team behind Woopra passionately believes that we have the world’s finest Web analytics platform, and we will continue building upon it every day until we run out of ideas. And that ain’t happening any time soon!
• You can now add an additional Website at any time you wish without ever having to wait for approval again. Subscription plans are available starting at under $5 per month (less than a visit to Starbucks!), with Free plans to be made available via invitations that will come from you, our users, as soon as that system is completed.
• Sites with over 30,000 pageviews per month will need to upgrade to one of our paid plans in order to continue monitoring all of your stats; however, we have the most aggressive pricing plans in the industry! Feature for feature no one even comes close to the value that Woopra provides! And on top of that, you will have our deepest gratitude for helping to financially support our systems and development progress.

Let me just pop in here with a short video introduction to how our new billing system works. I believe you are going to find it to be one of the simplest systems you’ve ever used, as its about a 2 minute process to add or upgrade a website to any Woopra plan. Special thanks to Cali and Neal from GeekBrief.TV for their help with this video! You might want to maximize the video to full screen so you can see the screen shot details. Just select the little four arrows icon in the bottom right corner…

One of the cool features of Woopra that was never documented is the KML server. Your Woopra on the desktop can serve KML files over http.

We are using the port 9565 (WKML) to serve KML over http. All you have to do is to use the following url:

http://<localhost>:9565/<mywebsite.com>

Let’s go over the setup step by step:

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@pratofundo tweeted that he runs four web analytics and stats programs on his site, including Woopra. While we understand that many of you want to run only Woopra, many people are using multiple analytics and web stats programs on their site for a variety of reasons.

Some like to compare their stats, checking how Google Analytics compares to Woopra’s numbers, or Sitemeter to Clicky. Different services track different information and data, and not all collect the same stats in the same way. They also offer the data in various formats and reports, giving the user different ways of looking at the same or similar data.

What I find interesting is how people compare Woopra to other stats programs and expect the numbers to be a perfect match. Each stats and analytics program tracks visitors and site activities differently. Woopra tracks individuals, not bots, while other analytics programs track bots and other server activities. Woopra is live, real-time data, so the numbers from a service like Google Analytics won’t add up because it picks a moment in time with hours between updates and Woopra is data now.
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