While I am in a stage of moving my blog to hosting on my own worpdress.org engine, as it is currently hosted on wordpress.com, I am looking out there for ways to add more functionality with new upcoming theme, as well tools that will help me to administer and track different feedbacks and statistics.

One of the important tools is the statistics, and here apart from the WP-Stats plugin, which is simple and neat, Google Analytics is perhaps the king. Now I found another awesome tool, called Woopra. Most analytical and site statistics are updated once a day at the least, or several times during the day. With Woopra, you get live track of visitors coming and going and moving through your site. You get the stats now. While the visitor moves through your site, you can track their path instantly.

The first thing that sets Woopra apart from Google Analytics is that it is a desktop application, so you get two elements - a plug-in for the site and a desktop client to monitor the statistics in real time. Like Google analytics and most other hosted analytics services, integration occurs via a javascript addition to the sites you want to track. The desktop client is a Java based program, meaning it is cross-platform, i.e. it runs on Linux, OS X and Windows. An easy-to-use web analytics panel allows comparative segmentation by an innovative timeline, giving you information you need for the day, month, last month, last quarter, last year, and more.

If you are not behind your computer, and want to check out how is your site doing, Woopra also offers the ability to view your website’s statistics through the Woopra Members on the Woopra site, which is really good added bonus. With an open API, Plugin capability, and a wide range of extensible potential, Woopra delivers the richest library of visitor statistics in the industry, and does it within an unmatched user interface designed to be aesthetically pleasing as well as highly intuitive.

Not only can you watch users move around your site it is also possible to interact with them in much the same way as Live Person works. At any point you can select a user who is browsing your site and choose to “start a conversation”. The user sees your message in the form of an instant messaging alert. This program could revolutionize the way we gather information about our visitors and interact with them. Imagine being able to communicate with your visitors without any extra software or hardware. In future it can even get better, like integrating audio and video, and what not.

Some other key features include:

• With the real time information on search trends, traffic spikes, user queries, generating content or taking action becomes immediate based on user actions.
• You can search your data by specific data points to get a deeper understanding of visitors that matter to your site.
• Woopra puts faces on the numbers. Regular commenters and registered members become names rather than numbers, which allows tracking of individual behavior and site usage over time.
• If you run WordPress, vBulletin, MediaWiki, etc it allows tracking registered users.
• Custom notification based on your set events like certain user’s visit, or users from certain country, browser, etc or an event like an ad click or sales, etc.
• Woopra is designed to be a platform rather than a solution and can be extended with plugins and skins through their API.

As of now the application stands at version 1.1.1.0 Beta, and during the beta testing phase, it is restricted to sites with less than 10,000 pageviews per day and will not gather information past that number if the site surpasses it.

Woopra has a thriving forum for any questions or issues you may have with the product, and is now available to anybody who wishes to signup and is entirely free. When the paid service becomes available, Woopra says there will still be a free service.

Linux Installation Notes:

1. Make sure you have latest JRE 1.6.x installed

2. Once you have downloaded the client, install it as root:

# sh ./woopra_unix.sh

$ sudo sh ./woopra_unix.sh (for debian based distros, like ubuntu)

You’ll find the link to Woopra in your Menu, find it and run the application:

While typing I had the following in mind: Imagine running this app on a separate old notebook, like a terminal, so you always have your eyes on what’s going on on your sites, just like you have them market exchange terminals. For any stats geeks out there Woopra will be a must.

As of now the plug-ins are available only for Wordpress.org and vBulletin, as other plugins are under development. I would have loved to use it here on Wordpress.com. So cannot say much of personal experience, but am quite sure that I am going to like it:

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