Woopra Beta Review
Like I stated in a previous post, Woopra Analytics is a fantastic piece of software. I have since had a day to play with it, and he is what I think so far. Continued after the jump……
User Interface
Here is one of the only parts of the software I will attack pretty hard. The GUI of Woopra is cluttered, very dark blue, and not easy too read. Some might even call it ugly. It reminds me of an old DOS game. Normally, that is enough to turn someone off, however I am sure as time goes on and Woopra comes out of beta, they will have options to change the look of the user interface. In the grand scheme of things though, these are small nitpicks.
One of the very interesting things that sets Woopra apart is that a desktop program can be used to review your statistics. This is a welcome change from all of the web based analytics programs.
The flip side of having a cluttered user interface is that usually a lot of information is crammed into a small space, and boy is there a lot of information here. If you are sued to Google Analytics, you will fell right at home as the 2 pieces of software share a good deal of the same types of information. Since this is a desktop application though, sorting information or show a linked URL launches very quickly and is very responsive.
There are 5 main tabs in the program: Visitors, Systems, Pages, Referrers, and Searches. Each one of these tabs breaks down that specific category even further. You can tell what the most common software and hardware is being used to see your sight so that you might want to target 
these certain users. As you can see in the shot to the left, Firefox 2 and 3 on Windows XP is by far the most common accessing the site for this period of time. As a fan of Ubuntu, I’m just impressed it even breaks down the code name of that given Ubuntu version! This can be broken down so many different ways quickly and easily. It doesn’t break new ground, but it doesn’t really need to.
One of the really cool features of Woopra is that you can track your viewers live as they are browsing your site. I am using this with WordPress and the plugin supplied by Woopra. This user tracking will not work with the alternative manual installation, you must have the plugin installed and working correctly in order to use this feature. You can use Woopra with many other CMS and blogging systems, but I cannot say how well as I have not tried it with anything else. Anything cool thing about this tracking is that if you let users register and log in, you can track them by their WordPress username.
The only thing in the Live section that I did not like? You can initiate a chat with visitors as they are on your site. Yea, as we say in software development: “Neat, but creepy”. While I am on the subject, don’t ever use this feature in any web application for any reason. ThePlanet.com, i’m looking at you……..don’t pop up a chat window every damn page. Moving along………
You can also set alerts as to when a certain event happens, you can have the desktop client notify you. Also, you can search through all of this information as well.
The only other complaint I can think of at the moment is that after enabling the plugin, it still was not collecting stats. So I searched the Woopra Forums, and it said that you have to add the <?php wp_footer; ?> call right before the closing <body> tag. Well, my index.php already calls the footer file. This made no sense as to why I should add a second call to the footer function. However, literally one minute later the program started posting stats. Woopra, you need to fix this issue and make the plugin literally plug and play for the WordPress noobs.
All in all though, I definitely agree it’s something to definitely check out.
This entry was posted on June 19, 2008. It is
Filed under: Blogging, Reviews, Software, WordPress Plugins
Stumble it!
Just as a quick FYI… that one little thing you didn’t like about Woopra is actually already taken care of.
Here is how you change the look and feel of the Woopra interface:
When looking at the Woopra interface there is a little icon of a monitor on the left side of the tab for your site at the top of the page. Click on it.
You can select from 10 different color schemes currently. In the future we plan to add support for “skinning” the interface.
While you’re in there you can also enter a nickname for the URL. And you can do this for each Web site you are monitoring in order to quickly differentiate between them.
We’ll also be working on some other improvements to the User Interface, but I’m not prepared to disclose them at this time.
Cheers!
John
Well there you have it everyone, right from Woopra themselves!
Thanks for the tip, and you really do have quite a product coming along.