On the Woopra Dashboard > My Searches panel section, Woopra shows you live the search terms people are using to arrive on your site from search engines as well as what users are searching for on your site.

In the Analytics > Referrers > Search Engine panel, there is a breakdown of your referral traffic from search engines. In the upper right corner of that panel section is a pie chart button. Click it to get another view of your search engine traffic in the form of a pie chart.

There is an overwhelming myth that the majority of search engine traffic comes from Google. Does it? Have you checked lately? Does the majority of your search traffic really come from Google or somewhere else?

To get a better feel of where your traffic is coming from, change the calendar overview. Click on the date range on the Calendar feature to look at the numbers over time.

It’s easy to say all your traffic is coming from Google, but where specifically? Google offers a variety of search systems. Is your traffic coming directly from Google the search engine, Google the image search, Google the Blog Search. or Google the news search?

Is a good portion of your traffic not coming from Google.com but Google.co.nz or Google.co.il? Do you know what those are? They are the various language and country specific Google search engines. NZ is New Zealand and IL is Israel.

Knowing which Google search engine people are using can change your perception of your blog audience.

In the Search panel, run a search filter using images.google in the Referrer/Keywords form and compare that number with the total you have in the search engine referrers? What percentage is it? Do the same with blogsearch.google to see where people are actually coming from within the Google empire.

Don’t forget that images.google.com restricts your search to only those using the dot com. By removing the domain extension, you can pick up international versions of Google, which end in co.uk, co.jp, and so on, such as images.google.co.uk.

Any surprises? Is Google not the king of search referrers for your site? Or does Google still rule your site? Does knowing which search engines bring traffic to your site change things? What will you do differently?

Web analytics and statistics programs offer you a lot of numbers and analytics, ways of combining or separating the numbers to help you analyze them and make decisions for your website and blog. However, not all analytical programs give you the information you need to really help you understand your audience and how to be serve them, as well as how to expand your audience by understanding what the numbers and trends tell you.

What analytical information do you really need for your blog or website? What are you getting and what are you not getting?

In other words, what do you really want to know about your audience? And can a web analytics program really give you the information you need?

If Woopra isn’t working right, if you are not getting the Woopra desktop client or web app to track your site, if the numbers are messed up, or you are getting errors on your site which you would like to blame on Woopra, please take a moment to validate your site’s code to ensure that there is nothing getting in the way of Woopra’s JavaScript doing it’s job.

While Woopra is still in beta testing, and things still go bump in the statistical night, let’s rule out site code errors first so we can dig deeper into resolving the real issue with Woopra.

If you are unfamiliar with how to validate your site’s code, here are some basic steps.

1. Go to The W3C Markup Validation Service or one of the validation sites listed below.
2. Type in the full URL/Address of your site.
3. Click the submit button.

Or you can install the Web Developer or Firebug Firefox Extensions for Firefox, or something similar for other web browsers, that will automatically help verify code semantic issues.

The resulting report usually contains links to help you problem solve the errors and issues. Once these are resolved, check Woopra again to see if it is working properly. If not, please report the issue in the Woopra Forums after you search for a solution. Let us know you’ve validated the site.

Validating your site’s code has more benefits than just getting it to work with Woopra. Search engines can move through your site quickly and easily with clean code. Pages will render better across most browsers making it easier for people to access and read your site. And Google’s PageRank loves clean code and rewards it.

Validate your site’s code after making any significant changes or on a regular basis to make sure nothing has crept in that could be causing problems under hood. Consider it part of a regular site tune up.

Site Validation Tools

• The W3C Markup Validation Service
• W3C’s Collection of Validators
• WDG HTML Validator
• The W3C CSS Validation Service
• Validating an entire site from Standards-schmandards
• Total Validator
• WordPress Codex - Validating a Website Tips and Tools

However, there are a lot of numbers that people are having a hard time understanding. We want to know: Which numbers make you scratch your head?

This isn’t just about the numbers shown in Woopra but what web analytics numbers do you have a hard time understanding or knowing what to do with them? How do you use them? Why are they important? And why are they important to some webmasters and not others?

We’ll soon be offering some basic tutorials in how to use Woopra and web analytics, so we’re curious about what statistics confuse you the most?

We are pouring through all of the reports and feedback on the Forum, tracking down those little details and issues that came with the complete rewriting of the Woopra code. We expect Woopra 1.3 to be our most stable and easy-to-use version yet, mostly due to your tremendous input.

We will be opening up approvals very soon as we move into the final stage of releasing the next version and set up new servers coming soon.

We’ve also added more installation tips and add-ons to help you install Woopra on a wide variety of systems and platforms. We’re working on screenshots and videos to help you learn even more about how to use Woopra. And we’re thrilled about the great feedback and reviews Woopra is getting.

We’re also working on a new design for the website, improving navigation and expanding our documentation to help you learn more about how to use Woopra. There is a lot going on behind the scenes!

Here’s more specifics and some more Woopra news you can use.

General Woopra News You Can Use

Woopra 1.3RC2 Released: The next Release Candidate for Woopra 1.3 has been released. We’re really proud of the new features and improvements, especially the work done on Analytics reports and the new Woopra Theme Editor, giving you the chance to color Woopra your way.

We listed all the new features and fixes recently, and you can download the latest version for those of you brave and willing to run bleeding edge code from the Download page. Read the list of things you need to know about the Woopra Release Candidate, especially with the issues that have already been reported on. Don’t forget that your feedback is wanted and needed in the Woopra Forums.

Woopra Web Analytics: The new Woopra Web Analytics version of Woopra allows checking your stats online. Your feedback is welcome and critical to helping to improve the web application version of Woopra. Check out the live stats map now using the Google Map API, too!

The Next Approvals: After a very successful round of approvals, bringing in more than 8,500 new Members to the Woopra family, we’re now testing Woopra across more than 70,000 websites from around the world, with traffic ranging from one visitor a day to millions of visitors daily. We’ve closed down the approval process until we release the next version of Woopra or get more servers installed, putting all our energy into the final development phase and responding to your reports in the Woopra Forums.

We thank everyone for their patience and we’ll be opening up the doors again for our closed private beta testing very soon. For those who haven’t yet had a peek at the new version of Woopra, check out the announcement of Woopra 1.3 and the video of the new version.

Woopra Live Chat: We continue to work on the Live Chat feature of Woopra. It is currently not working in the Release Candidates for most users. The new version will feature customization and a more friendly interface and greeting.

Woopra Installs Across Various Platforms: We’re continually adding tips and third-party plugins and add-ons for installing Woopra on a wide variety of sites. While the manual installation method works for most sites, currently, Woopra installation tips and add-ons are also available for:

• Blogger/Blogspot
• Drupal
• Habari
• Invision Powerboard
• iWeb
• Joomla
• Magento
• MediaWiki
• mojoPortal
• phpbb3/phpbb2
• Ruby on Rails
• vBulletin
• Woltlab Wbb3
• WordPress

You can find a full list of the tested Woopra Plugins in the Woopra Installation Guide. If you would like to add a Woopra Plugin to the list for testing, announce them in the Plugins and Add-ons section of the Woopra Forums.

Want to Share Your Woop? Don’t forget you can share your Woopra stats with fellow Woopra members with the Woopra Shared Access feature. Simply go to your Members > Share panel on the Woopra website and give permission to those you want to share your site’s stats with. They can set up their own custom notifications, reports, and more.

What Are You Saying About Woopra?

I’ve been traveling around the country giving presentations on Woopra at Real Estate BarCamp, in Portland, Oregon, WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Columbus, and REBarcamp Denver. I love meeting Woopra fans face to face, and their feedback, questions, and tips have been invaluable.

We will be featuring Woopra at WordCamp Dallas 2009 in Dallas, Texas, on June 27-28, 2009, and I’ll be adding more events to our list soon. Stop in and see us and say hello!

Digging around the web, we found some interesting ways and tips on how people are using Woopra. If you have a unique way of using Woopra, let us know. We are always looking for contributions from our Members.

@Scopique said: “Just busted a company using our subscription based site under another company’s subscription. #woopra for the win!”

@wordpressascms said: “One of my blogs is listed in the NYtimes real estate section? Trying to figure out why these hits are coming…Had no idea, thanks woopra!”

James wrote “Thank You Woopra, Entre Card, and YOU!” telling the world how his perspective of his blog traffic changed when he realized that while he had only a few visitors, they were from all over the world.

When I started my blog I didn’t have many visitors except for friends from my city. I looked on Woopra for the past couple weeks and was surprised to find people from Houston Texas, New York City New York, and other places like that. I was ultimately surprised today when I looked and found someone that visited my blog from Czech Republic… Even if this person just visited for 5 seconds….. HE’S/SHE’S FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY!

We are also delighted by all the fun things you have to say about Woopra and how much you love it.

From Tris Hussey: @Woopra Man I love my live stats, but I could stop any time. Really.

From Deltafoxtrot: @woopra is THE shit for web analytics. seriously.

From atubanos: Playing with #Woopra. It is too cool. THAT’S the way analytics should be.

Illus Apparel said: @Woopra I will never go back to an analytics tool that lacks live reporting. so awesome.

iansplashturner said: “Just upgraded to Woopra 1.3. Noticeably better than 1.2 and definitely better than Analytics.”

Code Munir - Explains the Statistics of Woopra (English Translation) offered a step-by-step overview of Woopra in Arabic.

There have been a lot of reviews about Woopra, especially looking at the next version.

Big Rig Tom wrote that Woopra is the latest in Web Analytics:

See this for yourself, you will be amazed! Even if you are not into web building you will still find it mind blowing what can be done now with a little imagination and a whole lot of hard work behind the scenes by these folks.

Thank you Tom!

Geek Technica reviewed Woopra, calling it a “Real Time Web Tracking Application For the Rest of Us” and said:

Woopra knows that in order for them to break in to this saturated market they not only have to provide something very unique but actually make watching your web traffic a fun experience. I believe very few, if any, web analytic service can claim that they have made watching stats a pleasant experience, if not cluttered and confusing.

Instead of taking the usual route of making a web-only analytic service, Woopra first started with desktop client and then much later moved in to a web interface also, making it an additional option instead of a primary source of analytic information.

Their desktop client, which is based on java and runs on all major platform, is the most beautiful and resourceful analytic interface you will ever see. As visitors pour in to your website you get real time information about the referrers, landing page, search engine term they used to come to your site, the country they are coming from, you can watch them live as they leave comments and my favorite option is the ability to chat with your visitors.

dougweb on “Outstanding!” wrote on the Woopra Forums:

In a previous life I was a Senior Producer for a software company. I think I can say I recognize a good, no better, NO - EXCEPTIONAL application when I see one. Woopra is incredible. A lot of very hard work has gone into this application. The features are many. Each day I explore it I find new ones and look for ways to analyze the information and use it to improve my sites.

You folks really have awakened the analysis world. I am more than impressed.

Woopra, inan? lmaz güzel web istatistik uygulamas? (Woopra, Incredible, Beautiful Web Statistics) (English machine translation) said (loosely translated):

I say good because it is really incredible. I read about the Woopra website statistics application and initially did not believe. More accurately, I wasn’t going to believe it until I could see it with my own eyes…

…After a wait for the approval, I installed Woopra and had to dump all my ideas and transform the folding of my brain around the surprise I encountered. It was a switch to a desktop application, not web app. Because normally I do not see a lot of real-time information in Google Analytics, Woopra gave me the chance to track my stats in real-time, placed in a very stylish design with statical graphics, keywords, questioning, chats, referrals, and a lot of reference knowledge - information more accessible than I can say. I love the real-time map, ability to see visitor details like screen resolution, operating system, IP address, browser, create custom notifications, and if you want, you can talk live with your visitors. In fact, Woopra provides real time communications with your visitors as a one-to-one solution.

The PeC Review: Woopra Promises Real-Time Web Analytics and Behavior Tracking is a video review of Woopra. They said:

It wasn’t that long ago that site owners had to wade through reams of log files to glean strategic information about site traffic and visitor behavior. More advanced analytics tools made it much easier to monitor visitors, find referrers, find operating system information, or even discover which browsers users favored. But Woopra, which is currently free, promises to provide that sort of data in real time, as it is happening. What to watch a visitor navigate through your new navigation system? Do it now.

…Woopra may represent the first of the next generation of web analytics tools, providing real-time site traffic information and reporting. It has the potential to give ecommerce merchants strategy-changing data right now.

Eric Enge’s “Real-Time Analytics with Woopra” covered the new version on Search Engine Watch, and Woopra was included in the list of The 23 best web analytics tools for tracking your visitors by Francesco Mugnai.

In case you missed it, one our favorite tweets came from Jesse Watkins, who posted, “@eliekhoury is the 1,000th visitor to http://www.jessewatkins.com since installing woopra, and he co-founded woopra! lol!”

Share Woopra News With Us

Thanks to everyone for the terrific feedback and input. We are amazed at the phenomenal response. Your stories help us learn about how you are using Woopra and how we can make Woopra better, helping you track individuals across your site and interact with them, moving from tracking numbers to tracking people. With your help, we know we are on the right path with Woopra.

Remember, if you tweet or publish something noteworthy about Woopra, we’ll retweet it and possibly publish it here. Just let us know. If you find something written in another language, please point us to it as well. We’re tracking Woopra discussions all over the world.

You can catch up with past Woopra news in Woopra News: Woopra Status, Woopra Reviews, and Woopra on Your Resume, our last issue.

This new release candidate is a highly recommended update for everyone running 1.3 RC1, and it’s also much more stable than the 1.2 release so if you’ve been having any problems on 1.2 you may wish to download and manually install this update.

New Features:

New Features

• This release adds a new theme editor which adds the ability to create your own themes
• In addition to the ability to create themes, we’ve added a new Woopra Light Theme
• The final 1.3 release will include the ability to share themes with the community, so get your themes ready for sharing!
• A new Quick Stats feature resides at the top, and this functionality will be expanded prior to the final release.

Updates

• A number of User Interface enhancements have been incorporated
• The code has been optimized to drastically decrease CPU consumption

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the Mac version launching process
• Fixed a bug while renaming Websites
• Fixed a bug while syncing Website properties
• Fixed a few memory leaks
• Fixed a bug in the login process
• Fixed segmentation reports bug
• Fixed a timezone related issue for some components
• Fixed a few bugs in the live map
• And over 40 other minor bugs…

This version is very stable compared to 1.2, and is a recommended update. We didn’t force update because we will do that with 1.3 next month when we’ll be introducing some major changes.

Feel free to download your version, and we look forward to your feedback as always:

• Woopra 1.3 RC2 (Windows)
• Woopra 1.3 RC2 (Mac OS X)
• Woopra 1.3 RC2 (Linux)

Stay tuned!

Testing continues on the new Woopra Web Analytics, and your feedback is welcome and critical to helping to improve the web application version of Woopra.

We published some of the early reviews of Woopra 1.3 Beta, and more are coming in every day as we move closer to the stable release. We wanted to share some of those with you, and some more Woopra news worth celebrating!

Woopra Status

A couple weeks ago, we announced our new Woopra Service Status feature to keep you up-to-date on Woopra critical development, servers, connections, and maintenance times. Check online at Woopra Status or follow it on Twitter at @wooprastatus.

Not on Twitter and want the status of Woopra faster? You can add the Woopra Status Twitter feed to your feed reader.

You can also keep up with all kinds of Woopra activity and news on the @woopra Twitter account. Or join our @woopramembers Twitter account where fellow Woopra Members can meet and follow each other. Woopra is on many different social media services and networks so come join us around the web.

Woopra Installation Guide Updated

We’ve updated the Woopra Installation Guide to include more options for installing Woopra on a variety of website and blog platforms and systems.

We’re looking for more articles and tips for installing Woopra on various platforms, and third-party scripts, Plugins, and add-ons for making the installation of Woopra easier. If you have one, let us know in the forums or through our Contact page.

Expect to see a lot more changes in the Installation Guide as we work on the documentation for the next version of Woopra.

Woopra in the News

In addition to the great reviews and coverage of the next version of Woopra, Woopra has been in the news lately.

In “Banking on future net worth,” The National, a popular English newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, did a story on Middle East-based technology development start-ups and said:

Woopra has had positive reviews from influential technology industry watchers and a loyal user base, with many comparing it favourably to the Google Analytics service.

Time Saving Tutorials with Len Charnoff has created two video reports on Woopra. In Woopra-Real Time Web Analysis - Part 1, he shows the basics and general overview of Woopra 1.3 RC1, and in Woopra - Part 2 he covers analytic features. He told his readers, “Run, don’t walk to get your Woopra invitation.”

Sean Malarkey of My Twitter Experiment has been tracking Twitter using Woopra to see if interaction on Twitter can improve site traffic. He says:

Another thing I’m excited about is the traffic is coming from all over the world. In the past I have created and worked on sites that were local - It was rare for me to see traffic from outside the US. Now I see traffic coming from all over the world. For some reason its exciting to see people from India, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, England, Poland, Iran, USA on my site at the same time. I use Woopra to view my traffic in real time, and its wild to see this traffic live.

In an interview with Frank Stephanski of JavaScript Workshop, I talked a lot about Woopra and why I’m involved with Woopra from a personal perspective:

…Woopra isn’t about tracking the numbers as much as the individuals.

Woopra changes the whole dynamics of web statistics. It’s not about the numbers. I don’t care about the numbers. I could have 5 visitors or 5,000. I don’t care. It’s what they take away from my site that matters. If I impact one person, my work is a success. If I can change the lives of a few more, I’ve overwhelmed and humbled.

It’s the personal touch that makes web analytics special with Woopra. Woopra turns those numbers into faces. Instead of tracking visitor 45398, I’m tracking Fred Smith or Alice Anderson through my blog. If they are using Gravatars, I see their face or avatar in Woopra. I now have a name and face to go with the stats. I’m learning about what they enjoy reading, what they are searching for, what answers they want, and what they come back for. They become friends and acquaintances. I’m like a restaurateur, chatting up my customers to find out what they really want to eat in my restaurant. That’s what I want to put on my menu, making them want to come back for more.

We’re still in the early days of web analytics, and I fear that so many are taking the profiling path. I’m a huge fan of what Woopra is doing with analytics and stats, to track the individual not the numbers, and thrilled to be a part of something I think is going to change the face of the web.

Ryan DSouza of Blogging Tips talked about Woopra as part of your web analytics research and promoting your worth to advertisers and sponsors.

Sponsor’s love to look at statistical data. So, create a web page containing your blog’s estimated daily or monthly unique visitors. Don’t guess this. Use web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Elogic and Woopra to track and report this information. Woopra, in particular, provides additional insight on traffic source and visitor activity.

The Lebanese Inner Circle reports on news, politics, social life, and a variety of things in Lebanon and recently featured Woopra in “Woopra - Better than Google Analytics?” They said:

Woopra is a real-time website tracking and Analytics application that has a number of greater and better features than Google Analytics, such as real time tracking and a desktop version. My favorite is tagging users, which for my knowledge at least haven’t seen on other analytics tools.

The founders of Woopra are two young, bright Lebanese. One is Elie Khoury, 23, LAU graduate, and Jad Younan, 24, who is also Lebanese. Together in Byblos, Lebanon, they started developing the idea in the early months of 2007. Younan worked on the server side, Khoury was on the client side developing the user interface using Java, which he submitted as his graduation project at the Lebanese American University (LAU).

Looking for a Programming/Developer Job? Need Woopra Skills

We just stumbled upon an ad for a Joomla Developer job and among the skill set desired were PHP, MySQL, Woopra, Google Analytics, CSS.

It’s amazing to realize that Woopra is listed on people’s resumes. Woop!

Woopra on Twitter

The Twitter coverage of Woopra has been amazing. Thanks everyone for all the great feedback for the next version of Woopra and for tweeting about how you use Woopra. We love it when people “woop” shout-outs to their visitors on Twitter.

We’re doing our best to respond to some customer support issues via @woopra, but remember, more in depth help and assistance can be found in the Woopra Forums.

We also have to thank and agree with designoMatt who said he loved working with Woopra and that “it’s fun to say. Woopra!”

Thanks to everyone for the great input and reviews of Woopra. If you have a news item for the Woopra blog, which is shown in the Woopra desktop client’s home panel to tens of thousands of Woopra Members, let us know through our Contact page.

It’s time for a celebration!

Welcome to all our new Woopra Members!

As announced recently, we originally planned on approving 5,000 beta testers in this current round of approvals. By the end of last week, we’d approved over 7,000 and decided to let a few more people in for the Woopra fun.

We’re celebrating with the release of Woopra 1.3 Release Candidate 2 in a few days, following up on the tremendous input from our Members on the Woopra 1.3 RC1 Desktop Application and brand new Woopra Web Analytics, a web app view of your site’s stats and analytics including the integration of the Google Maps API for a live view of visitors by street, satellite, and hybrid views.

As we close down approvals to put all of our energy and focus into the next version of Woopra and incorporating your tremendous feedback, you can still sign up for Woopra. We may be approving another round with the release of the stable version of Woopra 1.3 Beta in a few weeks.

You can stay with the stable Woopra 1.2 Beta. We will automatically upgrade the Woopra desktop client when we release the next stable version.

For a peek at the new features, see the feature list for Woopra 1.3 RC1, a video introduction of the new version, or read what others have been saying about the next version of Woopra.

Your help testing the Woopra 1.3 Release Candidates is welcome and appreciated. Check the list of things you need to know about the Release Candidates known issues. Your help reporting on bugs and issues, and offering a few woops and compliments, in the Woopra Forums is very welcome. If you are unsure as to how to help us improve Woopra, check out How to Help and How to Help Woopra and Woopra Members on the Forums.

Thanks again to all the new Woopra Members joining us. Remember, if you are a proud Woopra user, why not help spread the word with a Woopra badge.

Perfect analytics with all three sources of traffic being equal.

What’s so great about it?

The traffic sources are equally spread.

In the chart on his site, it shows traffic sources as 34% direct, 30% referrers, and 35% search engines. He says:

…by distributing the traffic among referral sites (which means you make good content that people link to), and investing in the user experience (again you make good content so they will come back) you have secured your site against virtually all Internet turmoil - which is the way to run in it the long run.

For some people, they would not look at the breakdown of stats this way. For some, a perfect analytics or stats day would be a giant jump in traffic. For others, it’s a fast and consistent growth upward. Still some want more referrals than search engines, and others are pleased with a ton of search engine traffic and don’t care about direct or referral traffic.

What would define your near or totally perfect analytics or stats day? What analytics do you depend upon to give you a day-by-day accounting of where you are with your site and business online?

When monitoring multiple sites in Woopra, it helps to tell at a glance which site you are watching the live stats and checking your Analytics on. There are currently 12 different color schemes to choose from, with more on the way in upcoming versions of Woopra.

As you click on the color options, Woopra will show you a preview of that color scheme. To choose that color, either click on the drop down arrow or click away from the menu.

The following video screencast shows you how to change the color schemes for your Woopra websites.