A few weeks ago my personal web site was approved for the Woopra beta (Technobabbles is still pending approval), and now that its had a few weeks to gather some visitor statistics, I’ve been able to check out what the software is capable of.

Woopra is a new web site analytics program by iFusion Labs.  It’s divided into two parts, the desktop client that gives you all the charts and detailed info, and the server application that actually gathers the data.  Setting it up was a piece of cake for me, I just installed the WordPress plugin and downloaded the desktop client and I was up and running.  Unfortunately they only have WordPress and vBulletin plugins available right now, but more are planned, and you can always manually paste the javascript code into whatever web site you need.

Right now, the Woopra software is in a very early beta, so I will cut the Woopra team some slack on certain things not working correctly; after all, that is what a beta test is for.  However, I feel like I have to mention the issues I had with the Linux desktop client.  They have quite a bit of work to do to get its resource usage toned down to a reasonable level.  It is literally using around 60% of my processor’s resources, the entire time it is open.  For comparison, I forced Firefox to open 20 tabs at once (by opening an entire folder of bookmarks in tabs), and at its highest spike it only hit 72% and only for about a second.  My computer is quite a bit outdated, but I do far more on it on a normal basis than what a web site analytics program should require.  The client was very unresponsive most of the time and I had to wait for about 30 seconds for a response any time I clicked on anything.  I couldn’t do any analysis with it behaving like that, so I installed it on a Windows machine and it worked like a charm.
[Disclaimer: I am using a 6 year old hp pavilion laptop with a 2.0GHz Pentium IV in it and running Ubuntu 8.04]

But, enough of the negative stuff, because Woopra really is a great application and shows tons of promise at this early state of development.  So, let’s dive into some of the great information and tools provided.

When you first open Woopra, you’re greeted by your ‘Dashboard’ area, which is filled with an overview of recent statistics for your site.  Across the top is an interactive time line of your visits and page views.  When you mouse-over a particular point on the time line, more detailed information about that day’s statistics is presented.  The bottom half of the Dashboard is split into a 5-way grid; each grid giving you different statistics: Overview (hits), Content (where they went), Referrers (where they came from), Searches (what they searched for to get here), and Country (what country they are browsing from).

the Woopra client dashboard area

Quite a lot of information is available right from the dashboard, but it’s just scratching the surface.  Along the left-hand side are the navigation controls, and the Live view is where you can really do some neat stuff.

The Live view is just like it sounds, a display of live information about visitors that are currently on your website.  It is also separated into a grid, with a map of the earth showing current visitor’s locations with little dots.  There is a listing of your current visitors, with the selected visitor’s expanded information along the right-hand side.  As you can see in the screen-shot below, my only current visitor was Ryan.  At first I thought, how on earth does Woopra know his name is Ryan?  I’m not sure of the complete details on how Woopra does visitor tagging, but I’m pretty confident they just compare IP addresses to registered users of your blog and to all commentors on your blog.  Then, they just use the names recorded there.  If someone is browsing your web site that has never left a comment or registered, they are simply shown as visitor-#.  If you happen to know who it is, you can ‘tag’ visitor-# as the appropriate name.

viewing a live visitor's information

The expanded data for visitors is quite extensive.  I can see Ryan’s IP address, the city of his ISP, his browser type and version, his operating system, his screen resolution, what he is currently looking at, and a short summary of his browsing history.  A bit excessive maybe, but hey, why not? And perhaps one of the coolest (and slightly scary for the visitor) functions of the Live view is the ability to start a chat conversation with anyone currently browsing your site.

the Woopra live chat pop-up

When you initially start the chat conversation, a small window slides up for the visitor, and they can click on it to start chatting away with you.  Obviously this could be a startling thing to have happen to you if you aren’t expecting it, and some people would likely think they were being attacked by a some malicious program; but it can be pretty neat and is quite a testament to Woopra’s capabilities.

the Woopra chat window

Next up are the Analytics.  This is where you can really get into what people view on your site and how they do it.  A lot of this information is really useful for web developers who need to see how many people are really viewing their site in a particular browser, screen resolution, operating system, etc.  I can see this being used to gauge the width of a website design based on whether or not anyone is actually viewing the page below a certain resolution.  We plan on using it here to see what percentage of Technobabbles visitors are using Internet Explorer 6, and if a significant portion are then we may consider adding support for it.  You can see some examples of the Analytics pages and information below.

The final section of Woopra, Manage, looks like it is only partially complete in this version of the beta.  All the other screens have at least a few tabs, but Event Notifications is the only thing available here right now.  The Event Notifications tab lets you set up and manage any type of notification you can imagine.  These are basically little alarms that alert you when someone is visiting and matches a certain set of criteria.  Just about any combination of the statistics that are gathered by Woopra can be used to trigger the notification.  These alerts happen in real time too, so if you’ve got Woopra open you could technically start a chat with the visitor that fits your set of notification criteria, and ask them for example, why they are still using Internet Explorer 6.

managing event notifications

All IE6 jokes aside though, after using Woopra for just a few days, I think it has the potential to be an absolute must-have application for any web developer.  It is definitely a fresh take on statistics with the focus on live visitor information all in a desktop client instead of from a server generated web page.  You can still view some of the statistics from the member area of the Woopra website, but the emphasis is on the desktop side of things.  Web developers, keep an eye out for Woopra as it progresses past the beta and into main-stream use.  It really is quite good.