“Why doesn’t Google Analytics have real-time tracking?”

This would have to be the single most voiced complaint I hear concerning Google Analytics. Aside from that its a solid service and a must-have for any aspiring blogger, but use it for any length of time and you’ll begin to wish for this as well.

Or it used to be.

After having used the Woopra Analytics service I’m confident in wholeheartedly agreeing with the promotional statement from the service itself:

“Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application.”

Yep, it is. Perhaps some commercial tracking applications are better, but since I only use free traffic analytics tools I have no idea. The service is provided through a downloadable desktop client with a basic online service unlike Google Analytics which is wholly browser based. This suits me fine as I always prefer desktop applications to using the browser and it opens the client up to provide a richer experience. Woopra is also available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.

Woopra is still in beta at this point in time, and you’ll need to get approval after registering so you can’t just sign straight up and start tracking. The good news is that confirmation is pretty quick. I think mine took a few days but they may even have improved since then. Each website you wish to track also has to be submitted individually and approved, but this is even quicker and mine have all been approved within an hour or two.

User accounts are also limited to:

• Sites with less than 10,000 pageviews per day.
• Users with JavaScript and the latest version of Java enabled.

Live Tracking and Monitoring

Live tracking is what no doubt will attract people to the service, but Woopra’s service goes far beyond simply providing real-time traffic updates. Woopra can track 40+ events and statistics including:

• Country
• Operating System
• Browser
• Language
• Screen Resolution
• Pages Viewed / Time spent on pages
• Arrival and Departure points
• Current visitor actions and history
• and lots more

This kind of detail provides some amazingly useful data. It’s kind of creepy being able to find out so much about your visitors but it does give you greater power to adjust your blog to the audience viewing it. Have a lot of viewers with English as their second language? Perhaps integrating some translation features would be a good decision.

You get the idea.

Live Chatting

Perhaps the creepiest feature of Woopra is the ability to live chat with any one of your visitors. If you choose to chat to someone a popup will show up on their computer asking to click here if they want to chat.

Personally, If this happened to me there is no way I would click it! It just looks totally suspicious. It’s a cool sounding feature, I just don’t know how effective it would be in reality.

Searching, speed and Interface

One of the many advantages a desktop application has over web based services is performance. Without having to reload pages to display results, Woopra is much quicker to use than Google Analytics and is really quite reasonable, resources usage wise.

For accessing any kind of data, indexing is a must, and Woopra has some fantastic searching capabilities allowing you to access any data point in the system. What information do you need to help you manage and develop your site? Specific user names, IP addresses, geographic locations, user browsing data, visitor history, visitor paths, arrival and departure points.

The data is searchable. Using the Search panel, you can reach into the data to find specific information about your site’s visitors, learning more about your site’s demographics and loyal readers. Woopra simply digs deeper.

The interface also provides opportunity for greatly superior statistic displays and representations of data, for example demonstrating visitor locations on a global map.

There is much, much more to this service and I really cannot recommend it enough. Woopra say they will be offering an additional paid version for high traffic sites eventually, but for most of you I’m sure the free version will suffice.

I haven’t actually heard a great deal about Woopra around the place, do any of you use it? How have you found it?