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Woopra: Live Stats Pron

June 7, 2008 |

I was a little bit down on Woopra when they made me think I had made it into their beta program but in the end was confronted with a request for an invite code I (and many others) never received.

Now, however, I finally got my invitation and I have to admit that, as far as free statistics packages go, they are doing a very good job. Right now, Woopra only works with Wordpress sites or vBulletin forums. Right now, the service is free (and a free version will always be around, as far as I can see), but they are also planning to release a paid Enterprise version.

Woopra gives you the basic set of information you expect from a modern stats program: unique visits; time on site; entry and exit pages; referrers; geography etc. Nothing really special here, but Woopra does a nice job of breaking down some of the data into useful groups. For example, you can choose between traffic from Feed Readers, Emails, Social Bookmarking services, Social Networks etc.

All the data Woorpa collects is also easily searchable. You can even take this one step further and set up custom alarms based on referres, titles, ip addresses, geogrpahy etc. (though I’m not able to really find a situation where these alarms would be very useful)

Part of the appeal of Woopra is, without doubt, that it’s a very pretty application to look at. That prettiness (see screenshots) comes with a price, of course, as you do have to install a Java program on your desktop to get the full experience – the website only displays a very basic set of information.

image

Live

One feature that is going to make stats junkies especially happy is the ability to track the users on your site live.

Chat with your users

One function of Woopra that I’m not sure a lot of your users might appreciate is that (courtesy of the Woopra plugin) you do have the ability to pop up a chat window on your site and start a text chat with a specific user.

There might be some privacy issues involved with using Woopra, as, while I was testing the live stats, I actually saw a number of my friends stop by. How do I know they were my friends? Because Woopra actually displayed their names for me, though I can’t quite figure out where they get this data from. One thing I can think of is that Woopra is aware of anyone who ever left a comment on the site or is a registered user. This is very much like MyBlogRoll, but the amount of data (and the ability to chat with the user) does take this to a slightly different level, I think.

Verdict

Woopra is a great stats program and rivals Google Analytics in its functionality. Analytics gives you an easier way of drilling down to some information and has a couple of more advanced functions (Adsense tracking etc.). For most people, these advanced functions are overkill. I basically like to see where people are coming from and how many of you there are.

Woopra has become a standard fixture on my desktop already – they are still in beta, but it looks like they are accepting applications within a day or two right now.

 

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