We’ve been meeting with Woopra fans and members from the last weekend’s OpenCamp, August 27-29, 2010, and meeting with groups throughout this week. They are putting Woopra to the test and reporting bugs, hopes, and dreams, and testing some of the new features we’re working on.

We need your input and help.

We’ve got a lot of Woopra we’re working on, including the Woopra Desktop Client installed on your computer, the updated web analytics version, the Woopra iPhone App, Woopra WordPress Plugin, and other soon-to-be released plugins and add-ons. That’s a lot of woop to cover and we need your help.

This is the time to dig into each of these products and services and uncover what you like and not like about them. We need to know what you want to see more of or less. We need to know what you want us to provide you today and in the future. We’re gathered together going over your feedback for the past few years and we need your updated input.

It’s your turn. Let’s hear from you.

On Saturday, August 28, an expert panel of Woopra users will be sharing their insights into how they use Woopra’s real-time analytics and live chat features for their online business. Led by long-time Woopra fan and producer of the No Fact Zone, DB Ferguson, the panel will cover SEO, visitor tracking, customer service with the Woopra Live Chat Widget, trends, custom reports tracking, and more.

The CEO of Woopra and co-producer of OpenCamp, John Pozadzides, explained how OpenCamp is using Woopra’s features as part of the preparation, planning, and strategy of the event:

All of this year’s OpenCamp organizers are using Woopra’s shared access so we can see as visitors come and go in real time on the OpenCamp site, tracking the response to news, tweets, articles, ads, and really see where our visitors are coming from. We’ve been able to talk to website owners driving traffic to our site about becoming more actively involved in the event. Since their audience is interested and signing up for the event, shouldn’t they have a presence as well?

In addition, you may notice the little Woopra Chat Widget in the footer area of every page on the OpenCamp site. This is the Woopra Live Chat Widget which allows you to click-to-chat with any available member of the team. We’ve had volunteers staffing the chat for the past two months, answering questions and guiding people in the right direction. We’ve walked people through registration, talked to potential sponsors, and have been able to instantly expand relationships with those who need a little more help or information than what’s on the page. It’s been an incredible experience for all our volunteers to feel intimately involved in the event participants way before the event begins.

John added that some members have been fighting over the “good time slots” just so they can use the feature to interact with the most visitors during active times.

The whole Woopra team will be at OpenCamp all weekend and would love to answer your questions or help you learn more about how Woopra works, and what you would like to see improved in Woopra. Come on down and say hello!

Thanks to the incredible development work by Cesar Alaniz and the Woopra team, we’re really proud of the Woopra iPhone App. Here’s what you need to know.

1. Requirements: The Woopra iPhone App requires the Apple iOS4 operating system.
2. Woopra iPhone App is Free: We are currently offering the Woopra iPhone App for free, though it is an advertising supported application. Woopra customers upgrading to a paid plan will no longer see advertisements within either the desktop or iPhone applications. Premium accounts begin at only $4.95 per month and offer more features and functionality.
3. Support and Issues: We’ve tested the first release of the Woopra iPhone App across 3G, 3GS and 4G devices and it seems to be performing excellently. If you encounter any unusual behavior, or have feature requests, please report in the Woopra Forum Mobile Apps section.

Woopra iPhone Features

The Woopra iPhone App currently features four core areas of Woopra tracking and data: Analytics, Live, Map, and Calendar. The key features are:

• Track visitors live
• Track visitors on Google Maps live
• View visitor data on the Google Live Maps
• See the Woopra Calendar daily stat summaries
• See basic Analytics segmentation on visitor and referrer data

This is the first development version of the Woopra iPhone App and we’re working on adding even more. If you have a feature you would like to see added, let us know in the Woopra Forum Mobile Apps section.

First Time Woopra Users

If you are new to Woopra:

1. Sign up for Woopra and add your website.
2. Install the Woopra JavaScript on your site.
3. Download and install the Woopra iPhone App from the Apple Store.

You should be able too begin tracking and viewing your site’s data and visitors in real-time.

Long-Time Woopra Members

1. Download and install the Woopra iPhone App from the Apple Store.

That’s it. You thought there was more?

Juan is working on a story about how people use Web chat in real world business situations, and he and I spoke for a while today about several scenarios in which it can be useful. As you can imagine I can only come up with so many ideas, so we wanted to open it up to the Woopra community and see what kind of new and creative ways that you guys are using chat capabilities!

One particular area of focus for Juan is in the area of “outbound” or proactive chat. In Woopra, this is when you use that little button that says, “Start Chat” to approach one of the visitors on your site.

So, if you’ve been using Woopra’s chat functionality, and you don’t mind potentially doing an interview with Juan for CRM Magazine, please respond to this blog post and share a few details! Here are a few points that would be of particular interest:

• What kind of a website are you using chat on? And what made you decide to use it?
• Why do you think more sites haven’t yet deployed web chat, or why haven’t they used more proactive/outbound chat?
• Can you give examples of how you are using Web chat? And what value do you perceive from using web chat?
• Can you give a specific example of how an outbound chat instance actually helped you close business, solve a customer issue, or delivered other value?

Juan will go through the responses and if you’ve provided enough detail he may just reference you from the blog post, or if he needs more info I’ll broker an email introduction between you based on the email address you leave in the comments.

I can’t wait to hear how everyone is using this feature!

Their goal in the video is to get 1,000 subscribers. They watched the live number grow and the Live Panel map of visitors arriving. Within the first five minutes, they had 375 people visit with 129 live visitors at one time. They also watched the incoming visitors to track their referrers, tracking who was coming in from Twitter, other blogs, and social media sites. At 26 minutes, there were 941 total visitors and about 300 sign up for their newsletter. At one hour, they had 1,655 visits and 2,774 pageviews, with 457 signed up for their newsletter, moving towards the 1,000 at high speed. Two hours into the launch, 2,490 visits, 4,096 pageviews, and 655 sign ups. Their 1,000 newsletter sign up goal was reached nine hours after the launch with 4,653 total unique visitors and 7,587 pageviews. Impressive!

Congrats to them for hitting their goal with their new launch and sharing their Woopra experience with everyone!

Learning the Lessons

While the team is still caught up in some of the crazy that comes with launching a startup, here are some of the things they can do and learn from Woopra to help them move forward and learn from their first day.

1. Measure Social Media Referrals: Using Reports > Analytics > Referrers, they can look at where they put their energy and what was the return on that coverage. Which worked better for them, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon…and which specific accounts. Did the Twitter traffic come from their account, or from retweets? Which account drove the most traffic and how can you tap that in the future?
2. Measure All Referrers: While many put their focus on social networks, what about email campaigns, newspaper or media coverage? What about online communities? Search engines? Where did all the traffic come from and how can they take advantage of the ones that worked, and improve the efforts that didn’t work?
3. Geography: Izzy and Tim are offering online business expertise and training. Why not plan to move from the online into the real world and possibly offer workshops or training programs? Looking at the Analytics > Visitors at the Countries and Cities over time, they can get a feeling for where their first stop might be.
4. Popular Pages: Currently, the team doesn’t have a lot of content. Their newsletter currently is designed to announce new blog posts with podcasts and helpful information, so there aren’t a lot of pages to track. Still, as they develop their content, the most popular pages are going to be the topics that are usually of the most value to their subscribers, so these will be pages they will want to keep updated and provide links to other content on their site. The ones with fewer views and traffic might be a clue they need to do some improvement in order to build up quality content.
5. Gateways: Checking Analytics > Pages > Landing Pages, they can determine which pages are the most popular entry pages, tracking the gateways to their site and ensuring they are most representative of their content, and ready to invite people to hang around and explore more.
6. Queries and Keywords: What are their subscribers and potential subscribers really looking for? As a training service, the Analytics > Searches > Queries/Keywords are very important to track search trends and queries. Are they really serving up what people are looking for?
7. Tracking Categories: The new Author and Category Tracking will work well with their WordPress blog and the Woopra WordPress Plugin, allowing them to track specific categories to find out where the most interest lies, and where interest lacks, building up their content accordingly.
8. Event Notifications: A Sign-up! Manage > Notifications can be set up to alert the team when someone signs up for the newsletter and when people land on a specific page such as their confirmation page. Instead of watching Woopra 24 hours a day, they can keep on working and still monitor their daily or weekly goals of new subscribers with customized alerts.

Once they get a feel for their audience, there are custom reports, filters, all kinds of things they can add to help them track what is going on. They can also add email reports to get daily or weekly custom updates on their stats, helping them keep track over time with easy-to-save and share reports.

Great work, guys, and glad you made your quote in such a short time! Thanks again for using Woopra to track the process.

If you have a Woopra experience you wish to share with us, let us know!

You can download Woopra WordPress Plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory. If you have been using an old version, we recommend that you use FTP to delete the old directory and upload the new version manually. You can try the auto-upgrade, but we recommend a clean install for this version, especially if you have been getting errors in the past. If you had errors and chose to install Woopra manually, please remove the Woopra JavaScript from your WordPress Theme first, then install the Woopra WordPress Plugin to avoid double stats.

Author Tracking

To enable Author and Category tracking, after upgrading the WordPress Plugin:

1. Go to Settings > Woopra and select the Track Authors and Categories option. Save the settings.
2. In the Woopra Desktop Client installed on your computer, go to Analytics > Custom > Add Analysis.
3. Create a new Custom Event and name it, for instance, “Authors” and select “Custom Events.”
4. Enter the key name “author” in the form. The word must be singular and all in lowercase.
5. Click Add Analysis.
6. The report is now added to your Custom Reports and Analysis list.

This feature is fantastic for anyone running a multi-author blog because it now allows you to keep track of each author’s total page views separately! For example, here is a sample from the GeekBeat.TV blog after being run for a few hours:

Category Tracking

But wait, there’s more! You can do the same thing for Categories on your blog, giving you a chance to really see what are the hottest topics for your visitors.

Using the above method, set the Custom Analysis report name as “Categories” and use the key “category”. After you save it, the report should generate immediately in the Custom Reports panel!

For Non-WordPress Users

What if you are not running WordPress? The good news is that this is also available to you. This is new core functionality is now built into Woopra and ready for everyone to try. You’ve got two options for making this work on your site.

1. If you are using a different CMS, hunt down the Plugin, script, or add-on developer and send them a link to the post and ask them to update their plugin. We’ll give them assistance if necessary, just invite them to join our Woopra Forums.
2. If you are a coder, check out our updated JavaScript Guide to see how to implement these in your custom code or plugin.

Have fun with your new reporting functionality. We’re eager to hear the lessons learned from tracking this new data. If you would like more features added to the Woopra WordPress Plugin, your feedback is also welcome. We’re working on it constantly and look for your input on helping us improve it.

Other Improvements

In addition to adding categories and authors to the Woopra WordPress Plugin, a lot of bugs have been stomped to the ground, including one associated with server issues for a few running older web hosting setups. We’ve also improved support for custom tracking with the Woopra JavaScript. We’ll be improving even more on this in the future, so let us know what type of events you wish to be tracked in your custom reports.

Also, give a round of applause to our intern, Mario Achkar who has been working overtime on updating the WordPress Plugin and helping us with some other innovative and exciting projects coming to Woopra very soon.

If there’s one thing we know about Web authors it’s that they are constantly seeking new sources of traffic for their content. It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger, a marketing manager or a small business owner, there is simply no reason to invest time with content creation and Web design if no one is coming to read it. For this reason, it’s important to figure out where to actually invest time for the greatest ROI.

…the Woopra team provided me with the raw information that I used to create the charts below. This report is based on hundreds of millions of data points collected during the month of June 2010.

Virtually every category of Website is represented in the dataset – education, news, government, SMB, Fortune 500, blogs, adult – and while it clearly doesn’t reflect all of the sites on the Internet, my guess is that it is a statistically significant and representative sampling.

The results analyze the top referrers of traffic, social network referrers, social bookmark referrers, search referrers, and media referrers with some very surprising results.

“I am constantly being asked by CEOs, VP’s of Marketing, Bloggers, and Social Media experts where they should focus their efforts for the greatest ROI. The problem is, no one can really give a definitive fact-based answer without having access to a very wide data set. And of course, virtually no one actually has access to a very wide data set!” explains John P.

“When I gave it some thought I figured that it was almost my obligation to compile the report since others weren’t able to, and the Woopra team was extremely happy to help the community by doing the work necessary to support the research.”

The Silent Social Media Success Story

All this research resulted in ReadWriteWeb’s article “StumbleUpon: The Silent Social Media Success Story” which uncovered the impact of StumbleUpon, a hot new driving force on the social media scene.

When you think of social media, two products immediately come to mind: Facebook and Twitter. If you’re in the technical world, you’d probably also mention Digg and Slashdot. A product that is rarely talked about among social media products, but has a surprisingly large footprint on the Web, is StumbleUpon. It now has 10.6 million users and regularly pushes big traffic to online publishers.

According to a new analysis by Web analytics company Woopra, StumbleUpon drives nearly twice as much traffic than Digg. StatCounter uncovered a similar trend recently, with StumbleUpon second only to Facebook among social media traffic drivers.

According to Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb, noted that according to Woopra “92% of search visitors originate from Google. This is much higher than Hitwise reports.”

I would highly recommend that you go and at the very least pick up your primary domain name with a .CO address before someone else grabs it to take advantage of your visitors who forget the M on your .COM address (can you say “domain squatting”?).

Everyone I know uses GoDaddy (so do we) so head on over to GoDaddy now and get your domain. There are also still a LOT of other great names up for grabs so if you’ve been wanting one for a while and all the .COMs were taken you might invest a little time and money in a few choice names for later use.

Here are some Coupon Codes you can use when its time to checkout:

• IAPt3 = 10% off
• IAPtfif1 = 15% off $75
• IAPtft1 = $5 off $30
• IAPtdom1 = $7.49 .com
• IAPth1 = 20% off hosting

Good luck with your domain hunt! Don’t forget we also have discount codes for other GoDaddy domains and more. And tweet me to @johnpoz if you get anything awesome! I’d love to hear about it!

We’ve introduced a new slick user interface similar to Apple’s look and feel, improving the visual interaction with the Woopra Web Application.

The Live Map information is important and we know you want more helpful information, so we’ve added more visitor details when you click/hover over a visitor pin.

We’ve also worked hard improving the web version for Internet Explorer users. While we understand that you want this to work across all current versions of Internet Explorer, the functionality is very advanced, so we’re got it working flawlessly with Internet Explorer 8+.

However, your best experience using the Woopra web version comes from using Chrome or Firefox. We recommend our users run this application on Google Chrome which has shown in our benchmarks to be 4 times faster than Firefox and more than 10 times faster than Internet Explorer running Woopra.

Coming Next

The Web version is close enough to leave the beta phase, but we know very well that some of our coolest features are yet to be implemented to the web version and we’re readying them for you:

• Notification System: Many rely upon Woopra’s event notification to be alerted when specific events and actions occur on their site. We rebuilt this feature from scratch so that you don’t have to be logged in to get notified. We’re also adding different mediums to get notified (SMS, email, Mobile Push, Desktop, etc…). That’s not everything! We’re also adding a bunch of new filters based on aggregate information rather than just individual actions or visitors.
• eCommerce Tracking: Your requests have been heard and we’re working on adding eCommerce tracking of transactions with our updated Javascript API.
• Funnels & Conversion Tracking: We’ve focused on delivering the best user experience and analytics for bloggers. It’s now time for us to put all our focus on delivering the best analytics solution for businesses. We are going beyond eCommerce transactions to help you track the most advanced analysis of your site’s visitors.
• Campaigns Analytics: Referrers is the most important metric for most of us tracking our social media and advertising campaigns. We’re going to expand our analytics to bring the ability to run campaign analysis not only by Referrer Types and Referrer Hosts & Urls, but by custom landing URLs.

I would love to take this opportunity, on behalf of our team, to thank our users who upgraded their subscriptions, we never believed you could be that many! You gave us the ability to expand faster and bring more people to our family and we shall in return deliver the best user experience, features and support.

Are you using the Web Version yet? Drop us a line and let us know why you do or you don’t.

Elie Khoury
Woopra Co-Founder.
(@eliekhoury)

If you have been using the Woopra WordPress Plugin, use the auto-update feature to upgrade.

If you deactivated the Plugin and are using the manual method of installing Woopra, please remove the Woopra JavaScript from your site before activating the Plugin. This will avoid double stats tracking.

The Woopra API Key for the Plugin is found in the Woopra Members area for your registered website.

Updates in the Woopra WordPress Plugin include added support for Curl in case fopen is disabled on the server, the setIdleTimeout javascript code fixed, and the API URL has been updated so all requests for analytics should now be working. We’ve added event name to the Woopra JavaScript event tracking and added extra error checks and handling.

Feedback is welcome in the forums. We are working on the next major update to Woopra and the Woopra WordPress Plugin soon, so input on how you would like to see it improved would also be welcome.

Our new intern, Mario Achkar, attends the American University of Beirut in Lebanon and is in his final year. His studies and expertise are in Computer and Communications Engineering focusing on automation, messaging services, and online communications. He is the creator of the Open Source Windows Live/MSN Messenger Bot/Client code available in multiple languages, Microsoft Messagner Plus Plugins, Desktop AI which allows keyboard, mouse, and other components to be easily manipulated and automated, and Webdp, an online messager avatar and contact service. Mario has won a variety of awards for his scripts and projects and we are glad to have him on board.

You will find him hanging out in the Woopra Forums helping people with their JavaScript, API, and WordPress Plugin issues, if we can pry him away from the World Cup.