Whoopee for Woopra, no joke, it’s really cool.
Aug 26, 2008 Webmaster Tips, Woopra
The newest - and admittedly the coolest - player in the web analytics market is Woopra. The fine folks over at iFusion Labs were kind enough to furnish us with a free demo account and we’re all still a bit awestruck. Woopra has a lot of things going for it from the get-go including sophisticated tracking features and metrics, but possibly the one feature that takes the cake for most interesting is Woopra Live, which streams realtime analytics info to a java client. C’mon… that’s really cool!
I have to admit that this preview will be brief, only because the sheer magnitude of all the features included in this suite is pretty astonishing. I’m still discovering all the bells and whistles (who reads a manual, anyways?). The standard dashboard, for instance, comes with everything you’d expect, such as visitor and hits (oh no, we reverted to old, outdated nomenclature for pageviews?). It also shows recent referrers, content, searches, and geosegmentation.
Installation was a breeze, taking cues from leaders such as Google Analytics, but stripping a lot of unnecessary code, all your IT department of web devs need is to paste code into the footer of each page you want tracked. Alternatively, there are several modules and plugins available for common open source CMS’s such as Wordpress, Joomla, to name a few. That’s a nice to have, considering it’s a brand new analytics suite.
The must-see feature is definitely Woopra Live.
With Woopra Live, webmasters can track individual visitor sessionsin realtime. I’ve never seen any solution on the market currently that does this better than Woopra. Tracking visibility features include visitor tagging, host name or IP address, country, city, language, local time, browser, OS platform, screen resolution, and the current page the user is viewing. It also shows the current navigation path, when they visited each page, and what the average time per page lasted.
For busy websites (and I hope this article does get a dig or two, just to see this in action), a Live Geographical View lights up like the sonar screen on a submarine. Another cool feature is the “start a conversation button” which allows you to open a realtime chat window with your visitor. Creepy? Maybe, but also a very sophisticated user experience feature included by default.
Overall, our first impressions are very optimistic. I hope to install Woopra on a few other busy sites as well, to see it in action.
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