Whooping it up on Woopra

Looking for a cool web site analytics package?

Look no further than Woopra. Currently in “live beta”, you’ll need to go to the site and request an account. And be prepared to wait — the waiting list is long. It took me about a month to get my account activated.

What can Woopra do?  From their “Features” page:

Woopra’s revolutionary server architecture, combined with its intuitively designed client software, enables seamless tracking of visitors. Webmasters can track over 40 different statistical events and analytics. Never before has so much information been instantaneously available to Webmasters.

Most analytical and site statistics are updated once a day at the least, or several times during the day. With Woopra, you get live track of visitors coming and going and moving through your site. You get the stats now.

And there is more, including initiating live chat with a user currently on your site. (Personally, I’d never shove a chat window across to an unsuspecting user — that’s a bit too “hard sell” for me. But the possibilities of chatting real time with a known user has a lot of potential).

The interface is slick, fast and intuitive. It’s easy to move around in, despite the number of features available.

One of my favorite features is the ability to filter the visitor data. For example, here is a screen shot from where I set the filters to show only visitors from Canada. Why would I care about understanding Canadian visitors? Because the Phoenix market is currently smoking hot for Canadian buyers. With Woopra, I can see where in Canada visitors come from, and what pages they are viewing. This gives me the ability to tailor future blog posts to meet their needs. I can even set up an alert that will notify me immediately if a visitor from Canada comes to the blog (alerts can be set for virtually any criteria).

The Woopra “Dashboard” holds a wealth of information. Here you can see an overview of visitor and page view counts, pages visitors are coming to (and exiting from), sites that are referring visitors to you, search terms being used to find you and the country of origin for your visitors.

One big thing that Woopra has that Google Analytics does not is real time visitor stats. It’s interesting to see who is on your site at any given moment.

A lot of info about a site visitor is displayed (including their name if they’ve ever left a comment on your blog). You can see the pages they are looking at, were they are from, and how many times they have visited. For returning visitors, there is even a history stored of all their past visits.

The more you know about your blog or site visitors, the more you can learn about why they visit. Armed with that, you can learn what does and doesn’t work, pen posts to appeal to a particular audience and craft your blog to appeal to certain demographics.

That’s powerful stuff….

For larger images, click on an image. Better yet, go to my Flickr Photo stream for multiple sizes, and additional screen shots.