Google Analytics vs Woopra

As you can see by reading my blog that I am not the type to compare and endorse products as I think the products owners surely must have a marketing department for that. Anyway, as a blogger, I like to be aware about how well my entries are doing. For awhile, I have been using Google Analytics (so as the top 100+ websites) as it is free and provides me with enough information on the state of my blog, corporate and client’s sites. The problem with Google Analytics is that it gives me late news (same as BBC, CNN, TF1 and Sky News and every other news @ 10 channels). I have been working in Business Intelligence for past three years and let me tell you that old news is what caused the current economy downturn. You should not based future goals on outdated data (information), you need to have information at your fingertips on demand and this is where Woopra fits in.

Woopra is not free but they do provide a free version (basic) which is enough for most website. I believe if you need more than what they provide, I am sure that you could afford the fee. Anyway, what I really like with this software is its real-time ability and I think that it is something that the folks at Google can easily implement. So I decided to give it a try (last night) and see what was the “big” deal:

• This is what we call real-time data, the fact that I could see where my visitors (to my blog) where coming from, what they were currently looking at (which article) and then where they went next in real-time. This is not a breathrough but the fact that it was available for free made it even better.
• Visitors tagging; they are so many sites which is used to tag content on the internet (Digg, Delicious, DZone, Reddit and etc…) so that you can share and easily found what you were looking at before. Ok, Woopra tagging cannot be shared but you can tag a visitor so that you can “spy” on his activity: how many times did it visit the site, which articles is he more interested in, track the comments and more. This is an important feature in profiling your audiences.
• Real-time chat; this is a good feature and I think that is indispensable for those running an E-Commerce site. Users are not forced to install any software, no plugins, nothing in order to chat with the site’s owner (Any security concern, contact Woopra). I tried it on my blog and to be frank, I haven’t been successful initiating a chat with visitors on my blog (they all refused the request 🙁 ) but I can see it being successful on E-commerce site. Another aspect of this feature is the ability for the site owner to start the chat. So you can see what the user doing and which page he’s currently looking at and therefore offer your help. I call it the virtual shop assistant. Users can also start a conversation so it’s two-way.

I know I did not go into details about Google Analytics but you can register for free and see for yourself. Google Analytics seems out of date, Twitter is real-time, Google and Bing are implementing real-time features; don’t you think that you need to be able to track your website performance in realtime too.

Another thing, how come Woopra shows some countries as EU when UK, France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Belgium and Poland are shown as their respective countries. What does the European Union means in that case? Also, it is a shame that Woopra is not a web based application (the current web version is so weak you might aswell use Google Analytics ;).

Anyway, if you have use it before or have a different view, feel free to leave your comments.

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