Woopra - not just visitor analytics, visitor interaction!

A few months back (4 to be exact), it was recommended that I check out Woopra a new analytics tool that will, more than likely, take away from Google Analytics dominance of the web tracking market. Google earned it’s share for a good reason, it’s really robust and easy to use. But then, here comes Woopra which is currently rethinking how we analyze our site visitors and takes it to the next level with real user interaction.

The long wait

I signed up for their mailing list when I first heard about their product, but I never got a single email from them asking me to come back – they almost slipped off my radar. One day, over a month ago, I heard that it went from being a closed beta to being open to anyone for signing up. So I immediately went to their site, signed up for access and waited for their approval. Yes, they have to approve your site. I waited and waited and waited. If fact, I was sick of waiting and pretty much gave up on logging in every day to see if I was approved.

Finally, after more than a month after sign up, I got my email saying this site was approved and ready to start going – it must be one guy that has to read every article before they let it through. It turns out that the wait was more than worth it. And here’s my first opinion of using it for just over 12 hours.

Let me forewarn you that it’s very addictive.

A desktop client

No, it’s not a browser app – do people even make desktop apps anymore? It’s running in my taskbar right now and I can pop it open anytime I want, The app is pretty nice, easy to use, and very straight forward. If you’ve used analytics before, you’ll be quite familiar with the data that it pulls in, but Woopra is so much more robust. The data is very visual and takes what is usually separated out and combines it together.

Know more about individual visitors

Most of time with other products, visitor data is always in a silo – you can see how many people use a particular browser, what country they’re from, or how many pages were looked at, etc. Woopra, on the other hand, shows all of this for each individual user. It feels more tangible and I feel like I know more about visitors. It’s less about page views and more about real visitors.

Live data and notifications

There are a ton of features in Woopra but my favorite has to be the fact that it’s live! I can see right now that there are three people on my site reading a couple of different articles and have been to a couple pages already.

I can also set up notifications depending on how I’m feeling. I can get an alert from the taskbar based on what I want to know. Like, “alert me when someone visiting the site is using IE6” or alert me when someone in the U.S. looks at my portfolio page” – this has a lot of potential and could be pretty distracting if I get carried away.

Referring Sites

This may seem like a small feature, but instead of referring sites’ data being jumbled all together, you can actually break the data down into different types of referrers – I can see how popular my pages are on social networking sites or if visitors have come from different bookmarking sites. It’s pretty clever.

Tagging visitors

With some CMS’s (Wordpress, vBulletin, MediaWiki), once a visitor has registered with the site or left a comment, they can be tagged to identify them in the future. You’ll be able to see your visitor (by name) when they come back to the site, giving you more info about visitor loyalty.

Please someone out there develop this same thing for TextPattern!

Interact with your visitors – yes I’m watching you right now.

So I keep mentioning interaction but haven’t said much more. The beauty of Woopra, is the fact that I can spark a chat with any visitor at any moment that I want. If I see there’s someone on one of my tutorials and has had it open for 5 or so minutes. I can jump right in and ask if it’s helpful or if they’re working on anything that I can help advise on. Potentially the disconnect between users reading pages can be bridged to interacting with me live. I’ll know more about what they’re doing and maybe I can even throw in some help if they’re struggling with something.

It may sound a bit creepy that if you’re reading this in your browser, I might be watching your every move, but how else will I know how people are using my site. Google Analytics sure isn’t cutting it for me.

Just beginning to explore

The interface is pretty advanced and the more data that it collects for me, the more value I find in it.

Give it a try and you’ll soon give up on your old system

Today I still have Google attached to my site, but that’s sure to disappear very shortly. If you’re willing to wait a few weeks for approval, I highly recommend you give Woopra a try. It will change the way you analyze website data and it will bring life to what used to be a very static interaction with users.