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.

By Charles McKeever

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:
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As I prepare to dive more into web analtyics, I’ve ordered four books that I will be studying and reviewing. Here they are, with some of my insights before I read them. As a professional blogger and web publisher, I’m eager to see how these books apply to my real world of blogging.

Of the top four books I found on web analytics on Amazon.com, only one appears to service bloggers specifically. The others are designed towards business owners and managers, with heavy emphasis on the corporate market. The world is changing and corporate marketing think is evolving greatly, so I’ll be interested in reading their perceptions and see if it lines up with reality on the ground with Web 2.0.

Woopra will be changing the way we look at the numbers on our blogs and websites, so I’m eager to learn about how we evaluated web metrics in the past, and looking forward to watching them change in the future with new, more powerful analytical tools.
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