Woopra web analytics program now open to public.
Back in February, Michael Sumner of DN Media hooked me up with a beta invite to live stats program Woopra. I’ve been hooked ever since. Now Woopra is out of beta, which means anyone can sign up and harness the power of real time stats for a small fee.
Woopra offers extensive stats including all of the historical stats you get for free with Google Analytics. But it also offers real time stats that allow you to instantly react to traffic surges, breaking news stories, etc.
The feature I use the most is the live visitor detail. It tells you everything you want to know about every visitor on your web site right now: where they physically are, what page they’re on, how they navigated to it, and if they’ve been to your web site before (and if so, how they originally found it and how long they’ve been on your web site to date).
As soon as you publish a blog post, you’ll start to see referral traffic hit your web site.
Beyond the cool factor, it’s also helpful to manage traffic surges and pick up news stories.
For example, let’s say your web site is suddenly running slowly. Checking Google Analytics won’t tell you anything about the slowdown since it is a few hours delayed. But opening Woopra may show that you’re getting slammed with traffic from Digg and need to work with your web host to increase database connections.
You can also monitor search queries that visitors used to find your site to catch on to new stories. For example, a couple months ago I noticed a lot of people searching for “Network Solutions class action”. They were arriving at an article I wrote about a class action being filed. But the reason for the sudden surge in search traffic related to the term was that Network Solutions had settled the case. The rise in search queries tipped me off that I needed to look into the case.
Woopra accounts start for as little as $5 a month for web sites that have up to 100,000 page views.
Mark Fulton says
It’s pretty slick software, love the interface and smooth chart display.
I tried the beta for a few weeks. It is pretty awesome being able to watch visitors navigate your site live… I found myself checking it all the time. 😛
web analytics says
Please nice alternative to GA now I think a better one actually.