Woopra Brings Live Stats to Blogs

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Bloggers have a new tool to look forward to if they like keeping constant track of stats and visitors to their blog. The product launched in early March and is available for beta testing for people who have an invitation code and receives less than 10,000 daily page views.

At WordCamp Dallas, John Pozadzides of Layered Technologies previewed the new program to the eagerly anticipating group of bloggers and marketers. He is also working on the project with Elie Khoury and Jad Younan.

What is Woopra?

Woopra is a robust web-tracking & analysis tool that works perfectly on any website. It is mainly targeted for small to medium websites ranging from few hundreds up to tens of thousands of daily page views.
Essentially, it is targeted for blogs interested in the most minuscule details of every single action. In addition, Woopra provides a precise real-time streaming of every single activity on the website.

GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.
Woopra also features a clean interface, including many graphical visualization components, such as charts, maps, panels… Along with many other clean and advanced options that make Woopra an ideal solution for webmasters who desire to discern all the aspects of their website.

Despite the wacky name, Woopra is a serious tool for analyzing your website traffic, discovering where visitors click, with instant messaging support, all bundled within a rich interface.

First of all, we’ll take a look at the main features. At WordCamp, the bloggers took a look at the software on one of their computers, and were able to interact with any of the visitors - all in real-time. With live tracking and the amount of stats gathered, the issue of privacy is surely to arise. With Woopra, their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy states, “We will not provide any information about our users and/or their traffic data to any other party for any purpose, unless required to do so by law.” Instead of having to wait several hours or more for Google Analytics to update your daily stats, you can see them live, as new visitors arrive or leave.

Woopra - Live Tracking

In terms of aesthetics, most users will find that the dark theme is visually appealing and is able to show all the data (tons of it, at that), in an “intuitive interface to display complex data sets”, “without discarding the balance between design and function”. In the future, there may be design changes to better suit a greater majority of users, but the release was already a month or so ahead of time.

Another key feature is activity search, which shows all the nitty, gritty details about your site’s visitors. It begins at where they came from, down to the keywords they used to search your site/get to your site. Once again, it is all in real-time, and displayed in chronological order for easier viewing of your visitors’ interactions through your site.

On a more (literally) personal note, you can tag visitor for further tracking, which displays their name each time they visit for easier access to frequent visitors. When a user signs into your blog or leaves a comment, you can have it so their name pops up, and you can initiate an instant message with them, even if they do not have the software installed. This will potentially change the way we think about our visitors and the interactivity with them.

Woopra achieves a dynamic, real-time environment in its responsiveness and presents visualizations of a website activity as it constantly changes.

Further information is presented through the use of notifications on your desktop while using the application. For example, in a situation where you profiled a key person (and they already visited your blog before), you will be able to set up a notification to spot the “special event”.

Another great feature of Woopra is the developer tools, which will eventually help developers customize and tailor the data into other applications and make more use of the data.

At the current time, the features are free and referred to as “premium”, although I am thinking they will switch to a free/upgrade type format (possibly as soon as Woopra is officially released) in the future or else go with an advertising plan.

Details and Requirements

Requirements: Java SE 1.6, Windows, Mac OS, or Linux for running the desktop application.

Other Details: There is no current set amount of websites you are allowed to add, but you might have to wait for their approval before being able to take advantage of the services.

WordPress.com users will have to wait until a non-JavaScript version is available as WordPress.com does not allow the use of JavaScript. A positive part is that WordPress.com users will be able to get first access once it is released to the public.

Price: Free

A lot of criticism has been evolving over the process of signup – you are presented a regular sign up page, anticipating a “full beta”, when in fact new members are not allowed to use it unless they have been emailed or personally given an invitation code.

The Concept and Future

Many people don’t like paying for services that they can get for free elsewhere. Unless (and if) the service stays free, website owners may still stick with the “big names” such as StatCounter, Google Analytics, and other services which specialize in one area or other select areas. If the development team of Woopra (or people using the API) can develop and integrate the stats into their own application, we could possibly see people switching to this service versus more “known” brands.

However, I think that until a heat map, and other ways for users to see how their site has been performing over time, not simply in the “current” time, there will still be users who need to use multiple services. After all, it is nearly always better to have multiple views of your traffic and growth instead of one which may be misleading.

This may not be the first site that allows users to see real-time traffic, but it is a defninte improvement with many astounding features (chat, graphical interface) that appeal to bloggers and small businesses for their anyalytics needs.

The future of the service looks fairly stable and optimistic as Layered Technologies recently secured $11 million in private funding and has several unique technologies that will allow the companie to see growth. If anything, the service will be bought by a larger company to add value for the people already using their services.