Woopra Website Analytics

I can't recall what search query I did, but, on Thursday I stumbled across Woopra website analytics. It's free and in beta mode and Woopra makes the claim of being the "world's most comprehensve, information rich, easy to use real-time web tracking and analysis package.' That's a pretty bold statement to make especially when you think of other analytics packages out there (i.e. Omniture) that take web analytics to the next level, but, I guess they qualify the claim by saying 'real-time web tracking and analysis package.'

I was interested enough to implement Woopra on this blog and give it a test run. Set up was simple, but, not quick because I had to wait for approval which came the next day. So yesterday I had my approval code and I quickly set up Woopra by inserting a short snippet of code. Then, I had to download an application which wouldn't work on my Mac so I put it on my PC.

Now that I inserted the tracking code and the application was installed and running I could instantly see who was on the E-Facts blog. The application interface has a nice look to it and is very informative right off the bat. There's a ticker at the bottom showing 5 visitor metrics and the dashoard shows you what pages are being/have been viewed, referrers, search queries and visitor countries.

The 'Live' tab shows me details of the current visitors including geographic location, browser, operating system, navigation path, and visitor history. Other tabs include 'Search'(search for visitors), 'Analytics' (includes 5 sub-tabs) and 'Manage' (create custom event notifications).

The features that I really liked were 'Start a Conversation' (live chat) and 'Tag This Visitor.' Clicking on 'Start a Conversation' opens a live chat window allowing you to communicate with a specific visitor. Its cool, but, also creepy at the same time. This is all facilitated through the tracking snippet I inserted into the HTML. 'Tag This Visitor' allows you to give a name to a specific visitor. To test this, I tagged myself and I see what pages I've visited, browser I'm using, country, etc.

Woopra certainly won't replace the analytics packages I use (Omniture and Google Analytics), however, I'm going to keep it on this blog and consider it as a supplement on other sites. It's going to be an excellent tool to provide me with instant gratification especially when a new campaign is implemented. Nothing like seeing the fruits of your labor in real-time!

From a customer service and marketing perspective, the customer tagging and live chat presents some unique opportunities. We use Magento for our ecommerce platform and the reporting provides insight on a visitor's current location on the site. So, when a customer calls in and mentions a specific page they're on the CS agent can look into Magento to verify the location of the visitor then go into Woopra and tag the customer. As an extra verification, you can instruct the customer to visit another page and you should see that page appear in their Woopra profile. Now, you can see where this customer goes and what they do in future visits! That's a marketing goldmine. The live chat feature should be used carefully. There's the potential of spooking visitors and causing them to never return. Be cautious with this one.

Check out Woopra and let us know what you think.