Woopra - Live at The Broad Brush

May 16th, 2008 | Blogging, tools

Woopra is a real time web traffic monitoring tool. It collects live data from your blog, and allows you to view it in a desktop client. The coolest thing is the real time part.

What you see above is a shot, capture live, of an actual blog reader at The Broad Brush. This person as the 5th visitor that Woopra had recorded. What is blotted out above is the IP address of that visitor. As you can see, it captures all of the visitor data one could possibly want, from browser and system type, to location and screen resolution.

If you look closely you’ll see not only which pages were visited, but the length of the visit. Pages visited are listed in order of visit, and if a page is visited twice, it appears twice, in the proper order. Total visits for that user are noted as well as total page views.

This data is captured and viewable at the Analytics tab. There you can view the collected and aggregated data to date. The analytics include tabs for Visitors, Systems, Pages and Referrers. Each tab provides thorough collections of data, and supports viewing the data in various modes, bar chart, pie chart, and download to csv.

Woopra is not just another blog stats tool. It does more than allow real-time viewing of blog action. It allows direct interaction with the blog readers. Direct as in live chat.

As you can see in the capture above, I was chatting with Mousewords. During the chat, the readers information is displayed. The chat is very straightforward, and has no ‘features’ as you’d find in IM clients. You basically type in the box at the bottom and hit Enter/Return. When chat is initiated, the reader sees a small window in the corner of the browser. They must accept the chat before it is engaged.

Woopra is still in beta. Some or all of the features you’ve seen here might change before final release. From my perspective, this is a tool I see myself using. There is just one caveat though. The chat feature has the potential to surprise visitors.

The chat does pop up a small box/window in the bottom of the browser, but seeing it from the other side, I might be wary of clicking on it. If the reader is not familiar with it, they may think it’s an ad pop-up. Some education on the blog might be helpful, but I’m not sure how to go about that at this time. Your recommendations are welcome.

In summary, I’m giving it a try and think you should too. Let me know how it works out and your thoughts on it. Too creepy? Too cool?