He sits in a darkened room, watching the computer generated map on the monitor before him. Suddenly, a point appears on the map and he cries out, “Aha! I have you now, Mr Bond!”
Or not… what’s actually happened is someone’s just visited his website and he’s using Woopra to track his site stats but, seriously, it’s a bit like being an evil genius at times! Let me give you the background.
Woopra provides real-time analytics with a variety of paid plans depending on your needs. The free plan tracks up to 30,000 pageviews per month and is supported by advertising in the reporting app.
While you can pick up your stats online, it’s the downloadable desktop application that makes Woopra really nice to use – it gives you information about who’s been on your site today, what they looked, etc. but also shows you who’s on your site right now, how they got there, and what they’re reading. It’s all anonymised, of course – you never know more than the person’s IP number and which country they’re in – but it’s incredibly handy to know which content on your site is drawing the visitors in. It’s also great for knowing whether that tweet you sent has had an impact at all.
One very cool feature of Woopra is the real-time chat facility. If I see a visitor in the reporting app that I want to talk to I an open a chat window with them. Conversely, I could add a “click to chat” option to the site that would allow visitors to initiate a chat session with me. I confess that I haven’t been brave enough to start random conversations with people, but I have tried it out on a few friends and it seems to work very well.
Woopra is a great suite of tools, especially given that it’s free. If you’re looking for some real-time statistics and you don’t want to sign up for a paid subscription just yet, give it a try and see how you get on.
Are you a Woopra user? What do you think of it? Or do you use another analytics app to track your site’s statistics? Tell us in the comments!
