Woopra was opened up to the world at the Dallas WordCamp where I met John for the first time. His talk was not on Woopra but he introduced it to the event in a very short, three minute spiel. Since then Woopra has generated a tremendous amount of buzz in blogging circles. In short, Woopra is a stats tool for websites that lives as an application on your desktop (among other places) and can provide live webstats on your visitors. I like it since it is fast and since the developers gave me an opportunity to look at the insides early on, I have developed quite a fondness for it. They are in growth mode and with the recent upgrade to their desktop client, they can support more locations and are in the process of approving a large number of new users for their service.
All of that being said, with my previous knowledge of Woopra and its capabilities, I was literally floored this afternoon by a flood of new “stuff” that I had either completely missed or capabilities that were added in this new release. So if you are a Woopra user (or if you are not, just sign up), pull up a chair, grab a cup of your favorite beverage and read on. This is pretty cool.
All of the following assumes that you have an active Woopra account, are using WordPress, have the WordPress plugin installed and have the Woopra application (1.1.1.0) installed on your machine.
- With Woopra, and the Woopra WordPress Plugin, you can monitor all your registered users and all your commenters. This sounds obvious/relatively mundane until you install the plugin on your WordPress blog and create an event notification on the application. Follow the bouncing ball.
- Open up your Woorpa application, click on the manage tab on the left and then click on Create a new Event Notification.
- Then type in “Known Visitors” into the label box, click Next.
- On the next window, click and activate the checkbox next to “Visitor is tagged or is a member” and click next until you come to the “Edit Notification’s look and feel” screen.
- Here click on the “Notification’s Icon” dropdown to click on “visitor’s Avatar” and then paste the following in the “Custom notification message” box: Visitor %NAME% is viewing %PAGETITLE% Then click on Apply Notification button
Now you will receive a notification on your desktop whenever a registered user or a user who has left a comment, visits your blog. This gets even cooler when you notice their gravatar shows up on the notification and you are now able to track these known visitors are they traverse through your blog. You can even choose to initiate a web chat with these visitors through the Woopra application. The chat shows up on their browser. This is cool and scary at the same time.
- Another cool new tool I discovered today was the little map of the world on the top left corner of the “live” tab. Now I had noticed the map there but had not looked into it much. Look for a small arrow on the top right corner of that map. Once you click on that arrow, the map opens up to a full screen view and now you are able to use your mouses’ scroll wheel to zoom in on any part of the map and use your cursor to identify users. I could spend hours doing this on a busy day.
- I had noticed the small column of labels at the top right hand corner of the Woopra desktop application but had not paid much attention to it. The lowest item on that list is called “live” and once clicked it shows the number of users on your blog on a moving bar graph, much like whos.amung.us
- The analytics tab has a bunch of hidden gems. Some newer features were also added to the items on this tab. Click on the Analytics tab on the Woopra application and look for the following:
- The “referrers” tab now has a few new subtabs. They include regular stats stuff like webpages, domains and search engines. But now this tab also include Feed Readers, Emails, Social Bookmarks, Social Networks, Media, News and Communities. Each one of these intrigued me and the I was taken aback by the breakdowns of referrals from various applications. The Email tab gave me the most food for thought. If your blog has email readers or you publish regular newletters via email, this tab could help you identify reader populations from various email services. Clicking on the graph part of the display brings up a historical view.
- The “pages” tab breaks up visitors by subdirectories. With WordPress’ permalinks, you can now determine how hard your yearly archives are working for you. Apparently, over a thousand people looked at my archives from 2003 this week. As your data grows, this tab could contain breakdowns by tag, by author and any other permalink features that you have enabled through your blog. I wonder why our WordPress tag is so popular?
- The last tab to point out is “systems”. Now this data can be mundane and almost all stats programs offer some sort of systems breakdown. Woopra adds to this functionality by letting you find permutations of systems options. This blog receives more Chinese speaking, Internet Explorer 6 users on Windows XP than any other language. I will be using that information to my advantage, I am sure you can find your particular niche to help or enhance.
Woopra is a great tool. It is even better with these little tidbits. There are literally thousands of different ways to enhance your stats and understand your reader population better. I have just outlined a few that I had completely missed till today.
Have you found any cool new tricks for Woopra that you would like to share?
I posted a video review of the latest Woopra beta client here you might be interested in:
http://jeftek.com/web/video-re.....analytics/
Jef
Mark, my acct. just got activated a day or two ago and I started using it today on my site. Can I change your title to read… “Official Coolness” ;? Loving what I’m seeing so far! Thanks for the tidbits.
Noticed Woopra at the Dallas WordCamp but it seems to be taking more than 1 week to get my account activated. I’d love to give it a try, as soon as I can. Here’s hoping someone from the company reads this. 😉
I have to wait until my account gets verified 🙁
They’ve been sitting on my account for 4 weeks now. 😐
Thanks for the great post, Mark. The site looks AMAZING, but apparently it may take awhile for them to active my account. Oh well, I think it is definitely wort the waiting. Although I think that it could be a little faster…
Be patient, people. I promise it’s worth it! 🙂
It’s a neat app for sure, but I’m confused about the “user tracking”. It works for people logged in…but what would be *really* cool is if it could track anyone who leaves a comment by sniffing their cookie. Then we’d know where and which pages they look at.
Also…the plugin doesn’t work for me, so I’m just using the manual code instead 😐
Ignore my last comment. It’s all working – and yes, Will, it tracks commenters via their cookies! This is seriously impressive
My account has been “pending” for about 3 weeks or so.
Mine went active this weekend, but it doesn’t seem to be working on my site. *sigh*
Unfortunately not very MAC friendly yet.
I too am on the “waiting to be approved boat” but this does look awesome! Thanks for pointing it out, i might not have seen it otherwise.
Also Waiting …………..4 weeks
I just got my invite yesterday evening, after signing up within a couple of days after WordCamp Dallas. It’s as cool as I thought it would be! I’m going to have to dedicate a computer monitor to the live feed for a little while at least!
Looks seriously cool, like what Google Analytics should have been 🙂
I’ll be interested once it’s formally released what the difference between the paid and free versions are.
Just signed up tonight and waiting for my code eagerly!
I just installed it today morning, and I can say with confidence that this probably is the coolest analytics tool around. I could play with it for hours. My productivity went down drastically today but I enjoyed every bit playing with this toy on my Desktop.
Woopra guys…you seriously rock !!!1
Just got approved yesterday and Woopra is SERIOUSLY COOL. Like a chilled beer on a hot summer day cool. Makes Google look like a warm cup of milk in comparison!
http://jonathanboettcher.com/w.....analytics/
Now this looks good. I love free stuff, especially free software stuff. That could explain my WordPress crush. I’m going to download and install today. I’m sensing a low productivity day already.
Waiting. Waiting. Waiting… Hope to be approved soon so I can play with it! I want to be cool!
Here is what I know from the Woopra blog and hanging out with the Woopra folks.
Woopra is limited access right now for beta testing. New servers are now being added and people are being approved in small batches to watch the server loads. Users are limited to 10K in traffic per day during the testing phase. Approval is a first come first serve, though there is now a pre-approved invite on sale on ebay, which would skip the waiting time. 😀
And yes, it tracks the comings and goings of visitors LIVE, so I’m glad you’re happy, Will.
There is a lot of talk of all the various features they are adding to Woopra, and a forum to report bugs and ask for new features, so check it out.
And yes, it is REALLY cool. Addictive, really. 😀
There something strange with my Woopra.
Its numbers are completely discordant with HiStats numbers..
Is that normal?
Anyone wants to send me an invitation code, feel free. 😉
OMG, it lets you chat with your visitors in real time? Can’t wait to try it out!
The numbers are different from other statistics program because they are LIVE. Most statistics programs have a cut off date and time and do not renew their stats until the next prescribed time, such as 12 hours or 24 hours. Woopra also appears to pick up a lot of visitors that others miss. They are doing comparisons and testing to find out why, so stay tuned for news.
Just wrote about it too.. but don’t have my site approved yet! Anyone has an invitation code to spare? Thanks for a great review here.
Just got approved today at 12:58pm (AEST); got it all setup in WordPress and man; this is impressive! I now have a new pastime to do on my puter; can I officially claim “Woopring” as my new hobby? 🙂
Woopra is a great service. I would love to read more Woopra tips 🙂
Would like to use it on my WP blog directly, but can’t seem to install plug-ins on the free blog. Anybody knows how?
Darn! found it on Woopra.com: WordPress.com and Hosted Blogs: Woopra does not currently work on WordPress.com or other hosted blog services unless the service has added Woopra to it’s options. We are working with many of these services to incorporate Woopra, so please let them, and us, know that you want Woopra.