Woopra – Live Visitor Statistics For Your Blog

Woopra is an innovative live tracking and analytics software for your website or blog. It provides detailed analytics data just like the free Google Analytics does, but Woopra does it live – which can be very interesting to look at it.

Up until recently, Woopra was in closed beta so you would need to apply for access and it could take up to a month or more, before you got access. The developers behind Woopra wanted to make sure they had enough server capacity before they let too many people in, which was also the reason for only allowing 10,000 pageviews a day per site. Once you reached 10,000 pageviews any given day, tracking would simply stop.

Now everybody can register for a Woopra account and start using it. There’s a free plan available, Basic, that gives you 30,000 pageviews a month (no more invitation required to add a website to the free Basic plan, for now!) , but it comes with ads (in the Woopra application, not on your website), 3 months of data retention and some other limitations. The cheapest paid plan is Bronze which comes to $4.95 a month giving you 100,000 monthly pageviews and 6 months worth of data retention. Plans goes all the way up to Silver, Gold, Platinum and Titanium. The latter being the most expensive of course, $99.95 a month ($999.50 a year) with 4,000,000 monthly pageviews.

WordPress Woopra

There’s a WordPress plugin that will make it extremely easy for you to add Woopra to your blog and even configure it so that it ignores administrator pageviews and events, you don’t want your own actions to pollute the statistics from real visitors, right?

The plugin also gives you a Google Analytics-like overview from within your WordPress Dashboard so you can view tons of visitor stats such as countries, bounce rate, visit durations, pages, referrers, searches and much, much more.

Woopra Application

Even though the WordPress plugin is great, the real power is in the application that runs both on Mac and Windows. This is where you can view everything live as it happens.

Take a look at this screenshot to the right, where at that time, I had 19 visitors online on TechPatio.com. That was right about the time when I had published a post giving away free Google Wave invitations.

The geographical live view (upper left corner) can be enlarged and zoomed in and out on, and shows you from where in the world your visitors are located right now. It also lights up whenever a new pageview occurs. Try looking at the geographical live view when you have 150 users online – it will look like an airstrike!

Let’s look at two users just for the fun of it… here’s a user from Redmond, using Windows and Internet Explorer 8. He’s looking at the post I did about Microsoft’s “Minorirty Report”-like Office Wall. I thought it was kinda funny that somebody from Redmond (where Microsoft is located) would be looking at a Microsoft post on my blog, so I checked the IP address and sure enough, it belonged to Microsoft. I guess Steve Ballmer was catching up to what his company is doing?

Here’s another one, a visitor from Cupertino (Apple’s hometown) using Safari on a Mac. This user is looking at post I did on how the new Snow Leopard Mail application would copy both name and e-mail address instead of just the e-mail address as it used to do (and there’s a fix too!). I also ran that IP address and surprise surprise, it belonged to Apple. I guess Steve Jobs is also unhappy with how Snow Leopard mail copies both name and e-mail address when you right-click it and select “copy address”?

Both the Cupertino and Redmond user only had 1 action each, meaning the only looked at one page. Obvioulsy you might want visitors to look at as many pages as possible, but when they arrive at the page providing them with the information they looked for (or that solved a problem), chances are they will not be browsing around on your site a  whole lot more.

If the users are doing more, however, you can follow each step they take, also if they click on an outgoing link too. It’s pretty cool and it gives you the option to “modify on the fly”. Say you have a campaign going on or something and you can see that users are clicking through to another page after arriving at your site, instead of doing what you actually wanted them to do. You can then change your site accordingly and optimize almost instantly. Sure, you can see that with Google Analytics too, but you won’t be able to correct it instantly. Woopra is real-time, just like your life!

Woopra Live Chat

There’s live chat too. I’ve only tried it a few times during some testing and it didn’t work every time. So your mileage may vary but it’s a great tool to pop up and ask your visitors if there’s anything you can help them with. Just keep in mind that not all visitors might be liking the idea that the webmaster is actually looking over their should that very same instant. Especially not if they came looking for Caroline Wozniacki’s Breasts.

Woopra Alternatives

There are some other real-time web stats alternatives to Woopra. Free StatPress for WordPress being one of them. Clicky is another option, but I believe it requires a paid subscription.

All in all I’m very happy with Woopra and I enjoy taking a look at it every now and then. If you’re really into it, you can set it up to give you a notification when a new user enters your site and you can do the whole big brother is watching you-kinda thing 🙂