Woopra

Interviews: Woopra’s Time to Share Our Story

Lorelle VanFossen — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:09:11 +0000

We recently shared reviews and highlights of Woopra, and a collecton of video reviews and tutotirals. Those are your words about how you use Woopra. Now it’s our turn.

Our small Woopra team has talked to thousands of people about Woopra, doing interviews, shows, press events, live demonstrations, web demos, and presenting workshops and training programs. Here are some of the highlights over the past two years.

More Interviews by Woopra Team

If you would like to talk to our Woopra team to do an interview, please contact us.

Alpha Testing for the Next Woopra WordPress Plugin Upgrade

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:02:56 +0000

Shane from The Rabbit Hole has been working on the next version of the Woopra WordPress Plugin and has announced the first alpha test release for the next version.

If you are among the brave and daring WordPress users, we’d appreciate your help testing Woopra WordPress Plugin 1.5 Alpha (download). However, there are a few things you need to know, so stop by Shane’s announcement for details. You can leave feedback there and on the Woopra Forums.

Those details include that the Woopra WordPress Plugin now requires your server be running S.O.A.P., a very common server application. With help from Pranshu’s excellent work on the Woopra jQuery code, the Plugin now includes jQuery.

Initial tests show the Plugin is faster than ever, reducing the load on the WordPress Administration Panels as well as on your WordPress site.

Shane is working on new features including localization, flash charts, referrers sections, and improved error reporting.

Again, this is test version. We’ll announced the final release soon.

Woopra Video and Tutorials Highlights

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:28:31 +0000

Recently, we shared with you a collection of reviews and highlights on Woopra written by members and fans. A lot of our members also made videos and included Woopra in your videocasts, podcasts, and shows, showing your audience how Woopra works. We’ve also made a few video tutorials and have more planned for the exciting next update of the Woopra Desktop Client.

We love seeing how you use Woopra, learning which features you enjoy and how you gather data and web analytics from your visitors with Woopra.

So here is a list of some of the videos from around the web showing off how you use Woopra, beginning with the video from GeekBrief.TV which introduced Woopra to the world.

Podcasts Featuring Woopra

Woopra Tutorials, How Tos, and Tips

Again, we learn so much from you by watching the videos, listening to the podcasts, and reading your reviews, tips, tutorials, and experiences using Woopra around the world – we’ve put together a list highlighting some of those tips and tutorials to help everyone learn more about how to use Woopra.

We love sharing them with other Woopra Members so they can learn, too. We tweet articles about Woopra on @woopra and share them here on the Woopra blog on a regular basis. Let us know if you have a video, podcast, or article on Woopra so we can help you promote them.

Maya Zankoul’s AMAZING Woopra Review!

John P. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:56:05 +0000

We’ve all seen a lot of stuff on the Internet over the years, and people often throw around the word “amazing”, but in this case I must say I was simply surprised at the fantastic and creative way that Maya Zankoul decided to share her experience with Woopra.

Instead of the ordinary blog post, Maya decided to tell her Woopra story in cartoon form. She painstakingly illustrated a complete storyboard relating her experiences, and as I read it she made me laugh while also capturing some tiny truths which I know that so many of us feel when we use Woopra on a daily basis.

Please stop by her site and pay tribute to this beautiful piece of work. I know she must have spent a lot of time putting this together, so let her know if she got it right for you too.

Oh, and if you’ve told your Woopra story somewhere please let us know so that we can enjoy it and possibly share it with everyone as well!

Woopra Reviews and Highlights

Lorelle VanFossen — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:34:18 +0000

2009 was an amazing year for Woopra. We opened up our beta access to over 90,000 sites. We came out of beta the end of October, and were thrilled with the commitment and enthusiasm from all those who invested in Woopra with their financial support. We’ve improved Woopra’s speed and handling and optimized the Woopra JavaScript, and improved the efficiency of the Woopra Desktop Client and Woopra Web App. We reintroduced the Woopra Live Chat so it works across a wide range of browsers, totally revamped the Woopra Members area for customizing your Woopra plans and options, and launched our new Woopra Email Reports so you can have customized web analytics delivered to your inbox.

While the improvements in Woopra are often not visible, we’re working behind the scenes constantly to make improvements to Woopra. We love it when people have noticed the changes in features, speed, analytics, custom reports, and respond, especially by sharing glowing reviews, tips, and tutorials on Woopra.

We believe that our members speak louder than we can when it comes to describing and sharing their enthusiasm for Woopra. As we move into our third year of Woopra’s public release, we wanted to honor the work our members have done in spreading the Woopra word with a collection of your articles about Woopra from the past two years.

When you blog about Woopra, we learn more about how you use Woopra through the feedback you give us. If you haven’t chosen Woopra as your web analytics program, these perspectives may give you the insights to help you decide.

We love sharing them with other Woopra Members so they can learn, too. We tweet articles about Woopra on @woopra and share them here on the Woopra blog on a regular basis.

If we’ve missed your article or review, please let us know so we can include it.

Woopra Reviews

There were a lot of announcements and reviews about Woopra, but we’ve collected the articles that review the features of Woopra, showcasing the Woopra WordPress Plugin, Woopra Desktop Client, and Woopra Web App and how they use it and their impressions. If you are considering Woopra for your traffic and web analytics metrics, these articles will give you the user’s perspective on how Woopra works for them.

Woopra International Reviews

Woopra News and Announcements

A lot of people helped us spread the word about Woopra. The following are examples which went beyond just the general news to include some tips, reviews, and information on Woopra.

Whew! That’s quite a list and only one of a series of Woopra articles, tips, tutorials, and videos we’ve gathered from our Woopra Members.

Thanks to all for your generosity and support!

New GoDaddy Discount Codes for Woopra Users

John P. — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:47:45 +0000

I’m very pleased to announce the creation of three special “coupons” now available to Woopra users to encourage you to use GoDaddy for domain registration and other hosting services. Of course, Woopra works with all hosting providers and registrars, but we are very pleased to pass along special offers from our partners which can save you money on complimentary services.

Going forward, there are three very simple links you can remember in order to rack up discounts with GoDaddy:

GoDaddy.com/woopra1 will currently get you unlimited $7.49 .com domains
GoDaddy.com/woopra2 takes 10% off any order!
GoDaddy.com/woopra3 enables $12.99 standard SSL certificate registrations

I personally have about 100 domains registered with GoDaddy and am looking forward to being able to save a bunch of money on future domain acquisitions.

Hopefully you will all find these links as easy to remember and use as I do. Its as simple as adding “woopra1″, “woopra2″, or “woopra3″ to the end of GoDaddy.com! Yee-haw!

When you arrive at the link you’ll see the discount reflected in the banner on the top left corner of the screen which should last for your whole sessions. Drop me a line if you find this useful or Tweet me and let me know @johnpoz.

Woopra Live Chat Breaks the Walls Down

Lorelle VanFossen — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:06:10 +0000

A few months ago, we asked our members how they use the Woopra Live Chat. Since then, we’ve been digging into how our Live Chat feature is changing how people connect and communicate with visitors through their website or blog and wanted to share our findings with you. Without a doubt, Woopra’s Live Chat is changing how people connect through their websites with visitors.

The Woopra Live Chat is a feature built into the Woopra Desktop Client. While the conversation is only one way, currently, it’s amazing how creative users have become in connecting with their visitors, breaking down the walls. We’re working on making it two way, so the visitor can initiate the chat from their direction, not just from the webmaster to the visitor.

To use the Woopra Live Chat, click Start a Conversation on the Live panel with any visitor. It pops up a small window asking the visitor if they would like to accept or deny the live chat. If they accept, that window is replaced with a small dialog browser window and the two of you can chat. To customize the chat window look and feel, and even add an avatar, go to the Woopra Members Area > Chat Settings. For more information on using and customizing the Woopra Live Chat, see the FAQ on the Live Chat feature.

Currently, the Woopra Live Chat is one way, from the webmaster to the visitor. We’re working on adding a widget to initiate conversations from your website.

How Do You Use the Woopra Live Chat?

Here are some of the things people have been saying about using the Woopra Live Chat to give you an idea about how easy and fun it can be, as well as useful.

Casyd1020 said:

The Woopra Live Chat Feature is a great one. It’s best use by far is in the customer service range. You can use the live tracking feature to watch users navigate your website. When someone has trouble finding a piece of content and you can see them moving around looking you can easily contact them and ask if they need assistance finding anything. It also helps some curiosity when you see a user from a far off country accessing your website and you’d really like to know more about them.

Woopra’s Live Chat brings people together in interesting ways, since it is just one of many different ways to communicate in real time. @airliarsim (Eleanor Reedokm) tweeted:

Sitting across from me in Holland is @ernohannink talking to @davemoyer in Denver via Woopra while I GTalk with Dave, all live. Too funny!!

Patrick Nelson of UnderDesign uses it for focus groups and usability testing:

…10 to 12 users in a room testing a new web app or web site; we could monitor their activity and their movements via Woopra and then jump in and ask them questions about their activity such as “Why did you click that particular link?”, “What made you go for that menu item” and so on.

We also found it useful to be able to leap in at the exact time that somebody would be having difficulty – if they remained on a page for more than a predetermined period of time, e.g., 10 seconds, we could ask them if they were having trouble and, if they were, exactly what that problem was. This produced far better results than the old way which involved asking participants why they struggled with a particular page anywhere between 15 minutes and 3 days AFTER the session. People’s memories often are not good and the answers we used to receive rarely matched up with what we saw. Being able to catch them “in the moment”, as it were, produced some fascinating insights into usability and people’s behaviour on the sites and apps we were testing.

Love the Cool reviewed Woopra and described the chat this way:

…heard about Woopra on TWiT’s Net@Night and couldn’t wait to use. Real-time analytics that allow you to micro track what’s happening on your blog…Not just that, you can even interact with users, asking them what the hell they think they’re doing on your site – just kidding about the last part, but you can interact, and that does feel slightly creepy to me, but whatever, more features the better. Just try to think of a non-creepy way to use it.

We worried, too, about the “creepy” aspect of the Live Chat, but we found that few people get resistance or resentment from being approached. We have many reports of members getting surprised and delighted responses from those who respond. Some report few responses, which could be due to the visitor leaving the site, closing the page, the chat popup being buried behind windows, or missed for many other reasons. We’re working on ways of improving the first impression, thus the connection rates.

We like how this review by JotLab explained it:

Imagine that you can tag a particular visitor and track their behaviour as they navigate through your site. Picture yourself having the ability to even chat with the end user as you watch them loop endlessly through your site, potentially lost. With Woopra, you can be the online sales assistant that you never thought you could be!

With more and more people paying attention and enjoying live chat sessions through Woopra, expect the response rate to go up.

In a review of Woopra, Website Magazine wrote that they like the idea of improving sales with the chat:

Another interesting feature is a built-in chat tool, which allows users to initiate popup messages to website visitors and actually talk to them – a terrific way to keep visitors moving along the sales funnel.

Michael Beaton knows exactly how the sales funnel works:

The chat function is sweet. I’m going to work with my retail clients marketing and customer service agents. ID rules of engagement!

@techburgh used Woopra to help him track down site spammers, using the Live Chat feature to contact them directly, a novel approach to an ongoing problem for many bloggers and webmasters:

I’ve watched spammers in woopra and messaged them. All based out of the US.

When asked if this approach made a difference, he replied that it didn’t stop them, but the time spent tracking them helped him to consider other alternatives to blocking their access.

Web Analytics World liked the live chat feature because Google doesn’t have it and…

[Woopra] has real time visitor analysis (creepy but great – you can see exactly which source your visitor comes from, the page they are on, and their path around your site etc), and secondly, they offer a great built in chat tool, that allows you to popup messages to your website visitors and actually talk to them – this is great for generating real time feedback or to offer help.

Got nothing better to do? Why not chat up visitors late at night? v6tc tweeted:

Woopra is where it’s at. I get to kill boredom by harassing visitors on my site. How else would I kill boredom at 4am?

The Impact of the Real-time Live Conversation

When Joseph Keith of SEO Hard Truth wrote “Stay Connected with your Customers REAL-TIME!!! You must Check This Out…Even Live Chat!!!,” he was waiting for visitors when Woopra stopped in to check out his review of our service. Within seconds of arrival, I got a request for a live chat and agreed.

In his review, he talked about how important features like the Live Chat is for feedback:

With this analytics program it allows you to place an Ad, start a PPC campaign or tweet, and get live results. This allows you to make adjustment to Ads, Landing Pages, Keywords, Tweets, etc. in real-time so no budget is waited on useless campaigns…marketing departments can use this program to keep track and interact with repeat visitors, tag them and even chat with them live.

How important is feedback? Would you like to provide instant information and support?

Providing feedback, valuable information and support to your customers is crucial. Why wait until the next day to find out what your customers are looking for? This program allows you to see when your customers are stuck checking out or have a problem navigating through your site. It also provides a solution…Live Chat. All you have to do is click the live chat and answer their questions or help them complete a purchase.

We’re often asked why we included the Live Chat feature. Primarily, it was a challenge to see if we could, but more importantly, Woopra is about real-time information, actionable information you can use now. Why stop at the numbers? Why not engage directly with your visitors? We wanted to see how close we could get to breaking the barrier between the visitor and the webmaster. The Live Chat breaks down the walls.

Have you tried our Live Chat feature? What has been your experience?

How Can Woopra Help You Better “See” Your Customers?

Lorelle VanFossen — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:26:59 +0000

In the November issue of Solopreneur Insider, DeBorah Beatty of Living a Created Life and the Living A Created Life Show talked about managing multiple market sectors, the art of niche marketing. She made a powerful point that many forget in the race to mass market their business.

Until you can mentally sit down for a cup of coffee with your ideal client/customer, until you can close your eyes and see them sitting across the table from you; that means know what they like to eat, how they take their coffee, who they watch on TV and so forth, you won’t know how to approach them.

The fun for me and I hope for you, is the journey to get to know those you most want to attract. Go meet them, greet them, and get to know them intimately.

Web Analytics expert, Avinash Kaushik explained in his article on “Recession Busting Analytics” that we learn more about our business, and our opportunities, with our customers and websites by focusing on the “simple every day things you do to find actionable insights for your company.”

How many times have you heard me talk about limitations of ClickStream data?

Far too often.

One more time: You can try to torture your data and guess. But why not ask your customers?…

Why rely on your opinions and then fall flat on your face? Why try to argue with a HiPPO and let her decide what’s best for your customers?

By getting your customers involved means you magnificently increase the chances that you’ll get it right. More often.

As we’ve developed Woopra, we’ve never lost track of our “ideal customer” for our web analytics program. We have a clear vision of our audience. However, like everyone, it’s too ease to get caught up in the piles of numbers and stats in the hunt for customers. We constantly stop ourselves to remember, it’s about the individuals, our members.

It’s All About the Numbers – Or Is It?

In the early days of learning about Woopra, responding to the many reports and reviews comparing Woopra to other web analytics programs, I’d hear over and over how the numbers didn’t add up. Why doesn’t Woopra’s numbers match those of Google Analytics or other services?

Like a broken record, co-founder Elie Khoury would remind me that Woopra tracks individuals, humans interacting with a website. Not bots, not crawlers, not all the noise that clutters our websites. Woopra tracks them one by one.

The moment a visitor leaves a comment or registers on your site, their visitor ID number becomes a name, changing the whole landscape of analytics. You are no longer tracking a number, you’re tracking an individual.

If you make decisions based solely on the numbers, without digging into the details, you lose track of that customer vision so critical to your decision process.

This is what our Woopra Members have to say on the subject, and how Woopra is changing their customer decision process.

@Woopra @jiribrazda here is that video of Twitalyzer getting overrun by awesome Brazilians
From @EricTPeterson

@Woopra showed a lot of French refers, so I put a global translation plugin on the site. Real-time action from real-time data! #measure
From @sarahd23

Amusing! @woopra moment: seeing someone access P’s Mum’s soda bread recipe from “Outer Mongolia.”
From @dduane

Wild stat from @woopra: iPhone users make up 4th highest browser traffic for RCC (behind Firefox 3, IE 8 and 7)
From @redcarpetcrash

Someone in the midwest is reading my article about the regator iphone app on an iphone, right now. thanks for telling me that woopra.
From @marshallk

If the users are doing more, however, you can follow each step they take, also if they click on an outgoing link too. It’s pretty cool and it gives you the option to “modify on the fly”. Say you have a campaign going on or something and you can see that users are clicking through to another page after arriving at your site, instead of doing what you actually wanted them to do. You can then change your site accordingly and optimize almost instantly. Sure, you can see that with Google Analytics too, but you won’t be able to correct it instantly. Woopra is real-time, just like your life!
From TechPatio

Have you been using Google Analytics to find out who’s been visiting your website? After all: knowing beats guessing, right? :-) Although the one day delay in Google’s statistics was always bothering me. Well, Woopra does it live! With a world map that could have escaped straight from a James Bond movie, telling you who’s visiting your website right now and even how (s)he got there! You can even start a live chat with your visitors. It’s great! Free beta testing closes today, so make sure you get a free account and sign up your website(s!) for beta testing approval ASAP!
From Daepunt

There are at the moment so many sites out there that making one and just hoping for visitors to come has become the number one way to fail on the internet. Having this said should bring up many questions such as; What can I do to attract traffic? But the one that is by far the most important is; How can I analyze my traffic? And the answer is Woopra.
From Alex Ianta of Z Generation Text

I sent out a bunch of tweets just before 9am. Woopra picked up the spike on my blog. screenshot
From: OriginalVlatte

…a real-time web tracking and analysis application. http://www.woopra.com/ Good for seeing trends, cause and effect traffic.
From RobArtPhoto

Just having a chat with a visitor from Hong Kong on the GradConnection site using Woopra – its awesome!
From @

Woopra is where it’s at. I get to kill boredom by harassing visitors on my site. How else would I kill boredom at 4am?
From @v6tc

@Woopra yes it is quite addictive, i even sometimes just browse my site to see how it sees me :D
From @simultech

Wow @woopra analytics is opening my eyes to some weird trends on NymTec.com… How about why 10 visitors this past week were on OSX?
From @jacobjanzen

@Woopra The chat function is sweet. I’m going to work with my retail clients marketing and customer service agents. ID rules of engagement!
From @MichaelBeaton

Just set up woopra for real-time analytics (as well as google analytics)… gotta know who’s checking us out, right?
From @headstartup

Just got woopra for my site – it’s truly wonderful! I feel like an evil internet overlord, but it’s so good I don’t care!
From @benoliver999

@woopra real time stats are a whole new world. They ARE reality when you can see users case by case, country by country. A whole new world
From @jstevh

@burghbaby yeah I’ve watched spammers in woopra and messaged them. All based out of the US.
From @techburgh

Just looked at my Woopra stats for my website. Visits from Jordan, Sri Lanka, Slovenia, Ireland, S. Africa, Aus., NZ, UK. with lots of page
From @glenzgolfmmbr

Woopra combined with Twitter is quite amazing. Tweet a link then watch in real time the visitors to that link
From @mjd574

@Woopra I’m thinking that I need to get ways to get the company out there, to improve traffic. And yes, I am LOVING the live map!
From @AllanMLoveday

If you have a blog, we strongly recommend Woopra, for voyeuristic purposes alone.
PopeHat

While some of these are fun comments, they show a shift in marketing perspective, responding to the individual, not the masses.

Shopping for the holidays this year, I’ve asked a wide variety of shopkeepers and owners how their business is doing. What I used to hear was “business is good” or “business is okay,” putting all the emphasis on the big picture of how the business fares. This year brought an interesting change. The responses revolved around the customers and their needs. “Customers are slow to decide this year,” “our customers are being more selective,” and “our customers are being careful with their money.”

This isn’t new. It goes back to the village store where everybody knows your name. If you don’t know your customers, how can you give them your best service?

We’re moving back to the global village where energies are not put on bringing in thousands of visitors to your site but better serving the ones who visit, and return for more.

We’ve been working on upcoming features that will help you to further define each person who visits your site, learning from the information they provide as well as their behavior and interaction with your site, but we want to know from you about what it is that you want to know about your visitors that will help you get that clear vision of your ideal customer.

What information do you need in order to see them sitting across from you at the table in a café or even in your kitchen. How can Woopra help you clarify that vision?

Brand Spankin’ New Email Stats! Come And Get Em’!

John P. — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 04:20:25 +0000

Yeah! Some of you may have never noticed they were missing, and some of you may have never known we had them, but there was an often ignored Woopra feature that was on the list of things to update – which just got completely overhauled. Namely, the ability to get email reports for any of your site’s stats sent to you on a Daily, Weekly or Monthly basis.

NOTE: This is one of the features that only comes with the paid accounts. The reports generate a lot of load on our servers, especially when we are talking about thousands of them at a time. So if you are on the free plan you can bump up to Bronze for $5 per month and get these reports (among other things).

These stats are fully customizable, and you can choose who should receive them (multiple recipients is perfectly fine too), how often they should be sent, and even which particular stats should be included within the report. Oh, and in case I forgot to mention it, you can also generate an email report on demand whenever you need one.

So, if the boss is breathing down your neck for an analysis of the Web site traffic, you might want to act like it’s going to be a whole lot of work to “pull all that data together”, then take an extra long coffee break, play a helicopter game, and finally log into your Member’s area and just run the report. It will come out all freshly baked and nicely formatted so you can just print it out or email it over to him.

Of course, that assumes that you didn’t previously already use Woopra’s Sharing feature to give your boss access to the stats. In which case he probably already has his own different reports set up and scheduled, so he really isn’t going to be happy about that long coffee break now is he?

Right then. Back to work! But not before you head over to your Member’s area and set up your own custom email reports. Enjoy!

Server Failure and Progress Report

John P. — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:35:57 +0000

I have the unfortunate task of having to report an unusual server outage that affected some clients today. Earlier we noticed some errors coming from one of our core monitoring servers. Shortly thereafter, the server failed to respond. We escalated the issue to our hosting provider who immediately began to triage the situation. Unfortunately, the diagnosis was not good.

It appears that at some point in the day the server, which runs on the Linux operating system, experienced a Kernel Panic. This is the equivalent of the “Blue Screen of Death” in the Microsoft world – otherwise known as a non-recoverable system error.

System crashes are a normal part of IT operations, but what is extraordinary in this case is that the system seemed to continue to operate partially during the crash, meaning that it went undetected for much of the day. Although the system was acting normal, it was not collecting data. Once the problem was isolated and the system restarted we learned of the missing stats for many of the customers on this server, which brings me to the point of this update.

Although the physical machine was restarted and is functioning properly at this time, frankly we no longer trust it. So in the next day or two we will be migrating the data to a new server as a precautionary measure. In addition to replacing this server, we were unnerved by the fact that it escaped notice for so long and we are working on new plans for earlier detection and greater redundancy.

Only a very small percentage of clients was affected, but if you are wondering if you were among them you can simply take a look at your stats for today and if you have any then you were not affected. If you see several hours of zero visitors when you would otherwise have expected them, then it’s likely your account was on the server in question. Please keep in mind that as we move the data in the near future there may be a period of up to an hour where the server will be unavailable; however, we will do our best to minimize any further downtime.

On behalf of the team, we apologize for any inconvenience this incident may have caused, and we wanted to let everyone know that we continue to refine and improve the system every single day.

Thank you for your patronage and your kind understanding as we work through these issues.

Sincerely,

John P.
@johnpoz