Woopra Review

You might recall earlier in the year a flurry of reviews of an analytics service called Woopra. They made a splash at WordCamp Dallas, which led to appearances on TechCrunch and the fantastic Geek Brief (got to love that show).

Woopra is a real-time stats service for websites and blogs. Unlike traditional analytics solutions, you can actually see people arriving at your site, and even chat with them in an IM/IRC-like chat window.

Sounds neat, huh?

I originally heard about it from Lorelle at SOBCon (Lorelle interviews the founders of Woopra here). She was handing out invites, but I didn’t get one, but wasn’t upset as I am a Mac user and was “reliably” informed by a fellow attendee that it wouldn’t work for me anyway. Or maybe it only works on 64-bit Macs, or something. Or maybe it did work and I was just misinformed.

Anyway, a couple weeks back Jamie Horrop introduced the northern UK bloggers meet-up to the service and gave me an invite. This time I was informed it would work, so of course I was eager to try it out.

Woopra provide a WordPress plugin so I signed up, used my invite and installed the plugin … then forgot all about it. Little did I realize, it was not for some reason recording visits.

Today I did an email giveaway to my subscribers, a special report in PDF for free download. Seemed like a good day to have some real-time analytics. Ooops, no data!

Luckily as well as the plugin there is your bog standard javascript copy and paste, which worked a treat.

Woopra

As you can see, the interface is lovely. This java based desktop application looks fantastic, and is a credit to them, and an example for anyone else who thinks they can design a UI.

Is there more to it than gloss and glamor?

Yes, and no.

Other than the real time stats, which to be fair you can get at PMetrics, there is little here that you can not get at Google. Let’s face it, real time is not going to be something you need every day.

The chat part? Not convinced. I couldn’t get anyone to chat with me. Perhaps it is a popup blocker problem or a browser issue? Or perhaps nobody wanted to chat.

That all said, it could replace your current favorite stats package, it is pretty much all there.

Woopra

It’s really cool to see your stats grow and change as you watch. Quite hypnotic.

Woopra

For business users though there is one GLARING omission; no support for online BUSINESS. Conversions. Advertising tracking. Custom filters …

Consider your standard, default, business with an online presence. Someone who is using the web for sales, not just for attention. Where are the features that help those guys?

Luckily there is an API, perhaps someone will be adding something for us folks who care about making money and stuff. It must be said too, this is still under development.

So in summary, it looks great, and it blows the little guys like statcounter off the web, but you will want to keep Google for a little while yet.

Posted on August 26, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools

Comments

6 Responses to “Woopra Review”

  1. Jamie Harrop on August 26th, 2008 11:04 am

    Hey Chris,

    Thanks for the link love. :)

    I just want to touch on a few of your points, if you don’t mind.

    There have been a few people who got the invites who said they couldn’t get the plugin to work. I have a feeling this is because your “Website ID” wasn’t inserted in the plugin settings at “Settings > Woopra Settings”. I seem to recall having to manually enter this. The instructions from Woopra are less than clear, as far as I can remember (I’ll make sure John hears that feedback).

    Re. Chat. If you want to setup a chat with me so you can see how it works, give me a shout on Twitter. I’ll be here all day today. I haven’t tried chatting with any random people (only those who have agreed to it just so I can test it). However, on those I have tested it with, it has got past all popup blockers and browser/OS issues.

    The one thing the chat function is missing right now is the ability for the visitor to initiate the chat… like every other live chat script has. I’m sure this will come in the future.

    The one area where Woopra wins hands down over Google Analytics is outgoing link tracking. For Google Analytics to track outgoing links, your Analytics Javascript code has to be above all tracking events (ie. at the top of your page, as opposed to the bottom like they suggest most places on their Web site), and you have to add a small bite of Javascript to each link you want to track. With Woopra, you do nothing over than insert your normal Woopra Javascript tracking code or plugin. Simply go to “Analytics > Pages > Outgoing Links”. Although I do track my outgoing links with Google, this is so much easier and I’ve found it invaluable for tracking the amount of clicks to my Feedburner subscription page and the blog of my first guest blogger.

    The morning after my demo, I sent the groups feedback to John. Here’s what he said regarding conversions:

    “For conversions, we’ve been talking about that a lot, and it’s high on our list of priorities to add, so I’m guessing that we’ll put something out at least in beta within a month…”

    You’re quite right when you say you should still use Google Analytics or another stats program, but I only say that because Woopra is still in beta. I can’t wait until it’s out of beta and I can dump Analytics completely. It just seems so “90’s” compared to Woopra. :D

    Fantastic review, Chris!

  2. Chris Garrett on August 26th, 2008 1:52 pm

    Thanks, I am glad to hear they are working on conversions, that will rock :)

  3. Lorelle on August 27th, 2008 2:37 am

    And in the famous words of whoever, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

    Woopra is in beta. We aren’t putting the cart before the horse. We will have a lot more features, once we get the ground work in place and the program stable and solid across the wide variety of site architectures, servers, web host, and site and blog platforms, not to mention operating systems.

    Woopra has always worked for the latest versions of Mac, but when a lot of people wanted to test Woopra but had older versions of the Mac OS, we spent a lot of time making Woopra backwards compatible to handle the older systems. That’s the kind of dedication you don’t often find in new programs.

    The Woopra WordPress Plugin was just released (beta, too) which puts the analytics info right into your WordPress Administration Panels, something only one other server does, but not to the extend that it will do when we get past this initial testing phase.

    Woopra has a long way to go. Luckily, we have an incredible number of beta testers helping us test and improve it. With your approval comes the responsibility to help Woopra improve. Hope to see your reports in the forums!

    Thanks for spreading the word and giving an honest review of Woopra. That’s what we are looking for.

  4. Chris Garrett on August 27th, 2008 11:03 pm

    Thanks for dropping by Lorelle.

    I am loving Woopra, it’s a great service already. If features like conversion tracking and even better full analytics to help with PPC advertising, I will definitely kick Google into touch :)

  5. Brad Grier on September 17th, 2008 11:49 pm

    Hey Chris,

    Just found this post and had to comment.

    Woopra is my daily monitor for three sites I manage. Outbound link tracking is awesome. It is easy.

    On the down side Woopra’s been a bit unstable from time to time. The WP Plugin was a bit off too, but that’s cleared itself up. Given that this is a beta, I’m not to concerned as I don’t rely on Woorpa…other packages are still my meat and potatoes.

    It’s one of the best looking analytics packages, visitors to my cube are very impressed at the real-time stats.

    But I’m still using Excel for all the heavy lifting — Woopra is great for monitoring trends as they happen.

  6. Brad Grier on September 17th, 2008 11:59 pm

    Oop…hit submit too soon.

    Woopra can sort-of be convinced to track conversion events, if you’ve got a success / thank you page defined. You can even watch a conversion event happen in real time:

    Under Manage > Event Notification, you can create a ‘custom’ event that fires whenever a ‘Success’ page is reached (after a transaction, for example).

    To get that data out of Woopra, just use Analytics > Popular Pages. Then at the bottom of the window enter the filename of the success page. If it’s an offsite link, then do the same under the outgoing links tab.

    I haven’t tested this yet, but it would be cool to see if Woopra can track things like query parameters ‘pagename.htm?buysomething=yes’ etc.

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