Woopra – Part I

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what sort of traffic your website is getting, you might of resorted to going to some online analytics packages and log file parsers. Some of these offer a great analysis of where your traffic is coming from, the demographics of the visitors and even the visit time of your visitors. Analytical packages such as AwStats, Webalizer, Google Analytics, Firestats and even Yahoo!’s analytics packages offer a great range of features. What they fail to present however is a display of real-time and live visitor behaviour patterns.

If you ever wanted to track your visitors live, you’d have to generate an AJAX log file generator script or did as I often did, “tail -f” on my webserver log files to watch the users view various pages on my website. This indeed is extremely inefficient as i would be searching for various IP’s in the logs and the pages they were viewing. If you’re like me however you’d believe writing your own AJAX log file viewer is out of the question, I’d much rather spend my time tweaking or adding to my own website’s features! Then i got searching, live statistics! Could such a technology exist? To my amazement, it did! But I only found one. One live statistics analysation tool to rule them all! Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you, Woopra!

Woopra is the answer to what many of you have only dreamed of! Imagine being able to see a large map of the world, of which when your website gets a visit, a little beacon will pop up alerting you where the visitor is coming from. 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!

Woop who you ask? Woopra is a realtime desktop application (Win, Mac, Linux) that allows website owners to track their website visitor’s activity, as they happen, live, realtime, instant, magically! How does it all work? Well you need to include a piece of tracking code in your website’s template. I put mine near the bottom of the page, just before the closing tag of the body. This will then send user information to the Woopra magical servers, alerting them that your account (if it exists) has a visitor. Then, if you have the desktop application open, will receive this information, and display it in a super meaningful way, showing you the live stats! The tracking code looks like:

But do I need an account? Sure you do! Woopra is, at this point in time, in its beta stages. So it might be a bit hard to get an account up and active over night. They approve accounts, well sites within your accounts at random and overtime as they increase their capacity. But, you have to be in it to win it! You can sign up at http://www.woopra.com/members/signup.jsp. Get your account up and running then log in. You will need to add a website! You can do this by looking for the “Add Website” button, up the top of the screen (of course once you’re logged in). Click it!

Next here you must enter, accurately, your website domain and details. Please note the tracking code is a generic piece of code, in that it is not domain specific. The Woopra golden and shiny server will work out where the visits originate, and if they belong to your website. This is why it is important, now, to type your domain correctly. You will also notice there is an invitation code field. This is to get you instant account activation for your website. I have done a bit of research into this mysterious account code feature, and unfortunately, it seems the Woopra team only used this in the beginning stages of Woopra, and in turn is very hard to find any remaining invitation coupons! But hey, I could be wrong!

Next click “Add Website!”. Your website is now in the lottery to win live web traffic analysation! Unfortunately all you can do now is wait till you get approved. If you’re lucky, this might happen in a few seconds, or it might even take up to a couple of months! It all depends on how often the Woopra team sends out invites and how randomness likes you! In the meantime you may as well download the Woopra desktop application. You can find your flavour of Woopra from: http://www.woopra.com/download/#versions

Simply extract it, then install! It really couldn’t be more simple! Next open the application to be greeted by a screen like:

Looking good already hey! Next fill out your details, username and password and click login. Since your account is probably not active yet, you will be greeted with nothing! But as a teaser, you will be logged in, and then have the ability to check your statistics, for whatever site(s) you may of added! Here is a teaser:

So what now? Well this is where part 2 will come into it! In part 2 of this Woop-ass Woopra series I will be showing you all the ins and outs of the Woopra desktop application. In the meantime, make sure your website is displaying the Woopra tracking code on all pages you want! Adding it to the footer.php or whatever file is used on every page of your website. If your website is more legacy, and you have one file per page, you will indeed need to include this tracking code on each page! So get tracking adding! More to come soon!