Real Time Web Analytics

Real Time Web Analytics – Woopra

Tue, Jul 29, 2008

I’m now using Woopra to track this blogs stats in real time. There is information and some screenshots later in the post, but first little about what led me here.

Being a Stats Junkie

For a while now, I have been looking for a cheap solution to track analytics in real time. Google Analytics data is pretty good, but it takes at least a day to update the stats and being new, sometimes that just isn’t good enough for me. Of course there is the default Awstats program on my Bluehost account, but I’m finding that it is bland even with the real time stats. I’m sure as I gain more experience in marketing, I might only want to look at stats once a week or once a month, but for now I guess I’m just a stats junky. I like being able to see what each of my few users do while they are on my site. While looking for a solution to this problem, I’m coming to find that there are very few self hosted solutions to use for tracking stats. The most full featured solutions are hosted off site, just as Google Analytics is, which brings ones privacy into question. I think this is more of a concern with Google due to their dominance in the search engine field. Also, the fact that they sell you advertising could be a problem if they were to use your own stats to adjust your keyword pricing. The best option in my opinion for a self hosted analytics program is Mint. Arron Wall from The SEOBook also highly recommends Mint. One nice thing about Mint is that it’s highly configurable via what are called peppers. Peppers are just little community built addons to give you more features.

Woopra

While Woopra is not self hosted, I don’t feel that there is much of a privacy concern with them. Being so, I signed up for the free beta program and within 2 weeks was accepted. The beta program is by invitation only, but there are a limited number of sites being accepted into the beta. I definitely am liking the look and feel of the program so far. Woopra is actually 2 seperate services, a web server plugin and a desktop application that allows you connect to the server plugin to download your stats. The desktop application does all of the heavy lifting taking the load off of the server. Something I think is really cool, is that there is the ability to open up a chat dialog with any of the current vistors on your site. However, I’m undecided whether this could be a good thing or not. Would this scare away the person? Think about it- there they are reading some really informative post then out of nowhere a message appears: “This is the Webmaster speaking” . I think with the way I respond to popups and popunders, I would be like what the… and promptly leave the site never to return. I took a few screen shots of various pages on the desktop client. One thing to notice is the scrolling ticker at the bottom showing you todays trends. During the beta, Woopra is free. After it is officially launched there will be a free option as well as 2 paid options.