Analyze Your Website Visitor Data In Real Time With Woopra
Jul. 25th, 2008, by Wez Pyke

“Why doesn’t Google Analytics have real-time tracking?”

This would have to be the single most voiced complaint I hear concerning Google Analytics. Aside from that its a solid service and a must-have for any aspiring blogger, but use it for any length of time and you’ll begin to wish for this as well.

Or it used to be.

After having used the Woopra Analytics service I’m confident in wholeheartedly agreeing with the promotional statement from the service itself:

“Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application.”

Yep, it is. Perhaps some commercial tracking applications are better, but since I only use free traffic analytics tools I have no idea. The service is provided through a downloadable desktop client with a basic online service unlike Google Analytics which is wholly browser based. This suits me fine as I always prefer desktop applications to using the browser and it opens the client up to provide a richer experience. Woopra is also available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.

Woopra is still in beta at this point in time, and you’ll need to get approval after registering so you can’t just sign straight up and start tracking. The good news is that confirmation is pretty quick. I think mine took a few days but they may even have improved since then. Each website you wish to track also has to be submitted individually and approved, but this is even quicker and mine have all been approved within an hour or two.