Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Web Traffic Monitoring In Real-Time: Track And Interact Live With Your Site Visitors With Woopra

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Woopra is a new real-time web traffic monitoring service which provides extensive visitors and traffic data, alongside some very cool analysis features and the unique ability to track and live interact with your selected site visitors.

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Woopra, the new advanced real-time traffic tracker

As a matter of fact I have been looking for a new alternative to my now forever closed WebsideStory/ Hitbox account. Nonetheless all of the negative experiences as a customer I have had with Hitbox and which have forced me to take a critical final step only a few months back (Dec 07), Hitbox Professional was a great service, especially because it provided easy to understand web site traffic data in real-time in a way that, notwithstanding its own limits, I haven't found in any other traffic monitoring tool I have tried to this day. Too bad the company behind seems to have no interest in the small to mid-sized web publisher, has limited ability in fixing its own technical issues (they have not been able to ever resolve mines) and is clearly interested only in very large web publishers and corporate institutions who can pay them thousands of dollars per year.

Given the above and the disappointing alternatives available on the market I got pretty excited as soon as I was given early access to Woopra, this new web traffic monitoring service which really packs a hell of great features into a service that, nonetheless has its share of bug-troubleshooting and refinements to be made, is brand new and is definitely above the average in this small but rapidly growing field of real-time web traffic monitoring services, which will inevitably need to expand further.

(I am really appalled to see great sites and highly popular blogs tracking their web traffic via tools like SiteMeter or ShinyStats - I mean these are OK tools, and they do allow you to see your web traffic, but there is a lot more to traffic analytics than what these tools have been offering for the last few years... c'mon.)

As a matter of fact, nonetheless there is already Google with its Analytics service ready to capture a great part of this market, even Google's own service is still marred by lots of limitations, a significant delay on your ability to see what's happening (Google Analytics data is not in real-time), and, in my opinion, a great deal of improvement still to be made to the interface design and organization.

For all these reasons I am definitely excited to invite you to sign-up and try out this new real-time web analytics solution which I find full of useful data reports and sporting an interesting set of compelling data analysis features alongside a cool facility to filter, select, tag and interact live with individual visitors on your web site or blog.

This last feature by itself may be worth the whole price of admission, which for now amounts to nothing, as Woopra is fully in Beta and has only now started to accept sign-ups from the Internet public at large.

Head over to Woopra right now and sign-up for this valuable free service. If you have a small site in terms of monthly traffic (< 5,000 visitors) you will probably never have to pay a price to Woopra, who appears to be setting up a business model where only sites with a certain level of traffic or wanting more advanced features will have to pay a monthly fee.

To find out more about Woopra and how it works, take a short 5-minute tour of this new web traffic monitoring tool with me in the video clip I have just prepared for you.

Web Traffic Monitoring With Woopra - Video Introduction

Robin Good introduces Woopra and its key basic features

Full Text Transcription

"Hi guys, this is Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and this is Woopra, the new real-time web traffic monitoring service that really goes a little bit beyond normal tools that we have available today to check out our traffic.

First of all you're seeing here in front of you the traffic as it is moving in real-time on my site: start looking from the dashboard on the left side here where you see actually traffic moving across the continents and coming from the different cities online and coming to MasterNewMedia.

Here the visitors are coming through and they're assigned a unique serial number but you can even "tag" them and give them a specific identification number.

For each one of them not only you see immediately from which country they're coming from, but you get all the data about the browser platform, operating system, screen resolution, what article they're looking right now and whatever navigation path they're taking and whatever referrers sent them over to your site.

There are a number of other very interesting things: if you go into the analytics section you can see all of the referring web pages, referring domains, the search engines, you can check up the specific searches, the queries and the keywords being used on the site, you can check out the outgoing links for example that are happening on your sites.

But the most interesting thing is that you can actually arrange for custom messages to be sent to selected visitors. You can create the so called Event Notifications, which allow you basically to say "hey, look, whatever visitor is coming from the country U.S. Virgin Islands, only those people, and when they come and check out one of my articles that talks about YouTube, then you may want to say to these guys check out my other videos about Caribbean Islands that I have over here and give them a specific URL". I mean you can create messages that will pop-up very discretely on the browser of your visitors when certain conditions are met.

But listen to this: there's more! While they're moving on your site, I said you can tag your visitors, that is, if I knew that now some guy that I just sent on the site was coming over, I can actually recognize him, I can tell him to go to a specific page and see him come through... I can tag him and give him a specific name and I will see him each time he will come back while I will see in front of me all of their navigation history on my site.

And not only that. I can actually start a conversation with them.

So, let me see, somebody coming from Italy...OK let's see...I can pull up this window and can actually say: "Ciao, I am Robin Good and I am testing un nuovo sistema per chattare live con i miei visitatori, scusa l'intrusione" that is "I apologize for intruding, I'm just testing it".

OK, so now the guy who's visiting my pages is receiving this message via a little pop-up window on the bottom right of his screen which he can decide to look at and can decide also to respond to or not. He's probably not going to answer it because I am really intruding in his experience and maybe he doesn't know what to do. I'm not really inviting him to react but if he does react I can have a direct chat conversation with this person at any time.

I can also filter visitors then in a number of ways, and not only track in real-time what they're doing but actually I can interact with them and create even special notifications that happen only when certain conditions are met.

Go out and check it out, Woopra at www.woopra.com and you can get all this wonderful information including the live number of visitors, your top referrers, the queries people are doing moment by moment on your site, and much more at absolutely no cost.

This is still in beta, they're having still some rough corners to be smoothed out but for the rest is definitely something you want to check out.

Woopra!

From Robin Good, for MasterNewMedia this is all for now.

Ciao guys."