Woopra - Cool Analytics Toy or Advanced SEO & Conversion Monitoring Tool?

If you have your own website (ie not hubpages but your own domain) and still haven't seen or tried Woopra yet, and a surprising amount of people haven't, you really ought to have a look. 

Woopra was released in 2008 and has been a favourite here since first acceptance into the beta scheme, it's literally been on, ever since. 

Obviously Google Analytics is the most common web analytics package, and without doubt allows far more in-depth analysis of statistics and far more comprehensive filtering to allow you to slice and dice the data and look at it in multiple different ways than Woopra does, but that's not the point. 

The point is that the difference between Woopra and Google Analytics can be likened to the difference between images and video, it really is a whole different type of thing entirely. 

This is the big difference, Woopra is live, you can watch as a visitor hits the site, you can see the referral source, and if it's a search engine you can backcheck the search to see where your page was when they clicked it..

You can then watch their progress through the site, how long they stay reading the page, where they go next and every action they take until they depart. 

This is the key difference, because there is a whole world of difference between sifting through a month's anonymous web stats, and actually watching real user behaviour, live.

Woopra tags visitors with a number, which you can then name if you want to. If they comment on your blog it auto-tags them as their commenter name. You can then immediately see return visitors, what they come back to and read again, the level of understanding you can get from how people are actually using your website is far ahead of what you can glean from a static data package 

The reason it has become a firm favourite here is the ability to intercept (and likely freak out) certain visitors.. :)

Comment Spammers hate it - but we hate spammers don't we, so taunting them via Woopra is allowed. It's a doddle to spot, you see somewhere (from the far east usually, but not always) hit the site, with a referral string like:

allinurl:keyword keyword dofollow leave comment

and the Live Chat facility allows you to ask them not to spam here as they're actually typing out their "Great post thanks for sharing" nonsense.

Image protection - when people hotlink your images, you will usually catch them in the act and can send them a little chatnote saying:

"you're not planning on stealing that image are you? "

If they were, they will usually just abandon and go steal someone else's where the website doesn't know and challenge them about what they're doing :)

Troll protection - many blogs and sites suffer the occasional bout of malicious visitors, feeling brave in their anonymity, but realisation that they are not anonymous, and that you know every action they take, and every page they've looked at, and can send them live message while they are still there, often puts these types right off.

So that's all well and good, but what about more serious uses?

Well if you are a small business with a services website and you see a visitor lingering you can send them a message asking if you can help and often if they are serious you can engage with them without even making them fill out your contact form.

When a visitor hits your site from a known converting keyword, over time it is possible to be able to see in advance of them contacting you, which are the serious enquiries before they happen.

For example say a visitor hits our "SEO for Flash" page from a search like:

"SEO for Flash websites"

If they then proceed to homepage, packages, about, and then the contact page, there is approximately a 50% chance there is a real live SEO enquiry winging it's way in via email or phone imminently. But If they are based in India and hit the site via an SEO-based search, ie SEO Services xxxxxx, and go immediately to your contact form, then there is a 99% chance that there is an Outsourced SEO email heading your way :) Get the idea?

If you are running an SEO or PPC campaign you can watch "conversions" live as they click your affiliate link, and it brings A/B testing of pages to a whole new level when you can watch immediately whether responses to a page change are positive or negative.

You can also profile differences in behaviour easily, as for example it's easy to see at a glance that for example Australians and Canadians click the affiliate link, US citizens click at a much lower rate, etc etc.

You can also use it for customer contact tracking, we often send a potential customers a link to a page or article on the site to further explain something, if they don't go there, they're probably time-wasting, now, we know the difference :)

Installation is also easy, either add a script to your source code, or if you're on Wordpress just sign up and install the plugin. 

So as you can probably see, we think Woopra is great, and can't recommend it highly enough.

And the best part is that until you get to quite high page views per day it's free.

Check it out www.woopra.com