Woopra Analytics Review: Great Start!
Aug 27, 2008 Webmaster Tips, Woopra
After having the pleasure of using Woopra for the past 24 hours or so, and keeping a watchful (and amazingly addicted eye) on my own blog’s analytics numbers and realtime visitors, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a great start to what will be an amazing tool. Many other analytics suites such as Webtrends and Omniture claim to have the ability to track users from start to finish, but none of them do it in session-based realtime fashion like Woopra.
Many have said that Woopra is no match for giants like Urchin, Webtrends and Omniture, and I’d have to agree. But the argument that certain websites don’t require that sophistication of data collection is sound. Social networking based sites and content-rich sites that live and die by real time traffic numbers would definitely benefit from Woopra’s sleek interface. Plus, it covers all the basics and even includes a few extras that most other free solutions don’t have.
Some really cool features include pre-categorized referring sites/pages, which automatically filters referrers and incoming links by:
- Search engine
- Social bookmark
- Backlink
- Feed reader
Another cool feature is the chat client. By selecting real time individual visitors to your site and hitting the “Chat” button, you can open a floating Javascript chat client. This gives learning more about your visitors a whole new intimate twist, and should probably be exercised carefully. On the other hand, with customized event notifications, a webmaster could easily setup a trigger to go off when pageviews exceed “x” amount within a particular section of a site, for example a support section. Chatting with people lost in endless support pages could be invaluable to recovering potentially lost revenue.
A few interesting twists on old analytics staples include a keyword “tag cloud” included by default in the dashboard. It basically shows you very quickly how often certain keywords brought visitors to your site. The same functionality is normally included in a detailed list that includes instances, bounce rate, and exact phrases (which is also available elsewhere), but having a tag cloud could help webmasters reevaluate keyword densities or content formation in the future.
It’s obvious that Woopra isn’t quite complete yet, especially when considering there aren’t any features available to setup reports that can be e-mailed or printed out. There are a few export options here and there, but those do not appear to be implemented across each report screen. In addition, it lacks conversion tracking capabilities as sophisticated as Google Analytics. As mentioned before, it does include custom alerts that may be configured for commerce events or conversion successes, but it is doubtful that those events can attribute revenue numbers to any running totals.
In conclusion, the Woopra team has really gone beyond the standard free analytics options such as those built into Wordpress.com, Google Analytics, and server side solutions by offering something truly innovative. It’s got the sleek and sexy allure with eye-candy interface elements, is backed by a really cool real time tracking engine, and doesn’t skip on the standard analytics staples the average web analyst has come to know and love.
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