I was privileged to be at WordCamp 2008 when John Pozadzides unleashed the Woopra Beta on the world. The eye-candy appeal of Woopra was instant, undeniable and the richness of features was impressive right out of the gate. The most notable memory from that event was watching the world map light-up and “ping” with activity as we watched visitors land on and navigate around John’s personal site onemansblog.com. At an individual level we could watch people page by page as they navigated through the site, with information on where they came from, what search terms brought them there and we even had the ability to start a conversation with that person on the spot. But it wasn’t long after the initial joyous shock of feeling like you were looking at the bridge of a nuclear submarine before people started asking “what do I do with all that real-time information.”
While Woopra goes very deep on analytics and has much more to it than the real-time machine (pun intended), there is the reality that for some, the real-time aspect isn’t necessary and they’ll never use it for anything more than entertainment (watch a site getting dugg and you’ll know what I mean).
So should you use Woopra even if you don’t need the real time stuff?
Absolutely! With the customization options, forthcoming API, alerts and other features, it’s an incredibly rich and powerful analytics tool. But for anyone on the fence, allow me to provide a couple of scenarios to help make the case for real-time analytics including some examples of how I have personally used it.
Woopra Example 1: CityCrush.com – The Geographic Attack
When we launched CityCrush our focus was on building a site with focus on the Uptown/Downtown and immediately surrounding areas of Dallas. Our press, PR, email blast, everything was focused on that geography. As we sent out on the initial launch (which included some paid traffic strategies) we quickly realized that much of the attention we were getting came not from within the geography we were targeting but from the suburban areas around Dallas.
More specifically, we found that people with the greatest interest in something new in and about Uptown were not the people that already lived there but those who come here to work and play but aren’t quite as “in the loop” since they live in outlying areas. The effect of watching that initial barrage from the burbs mean that we were able to tweak our paid traffic targeting on the fly as we observed where traffic was coming from and what was converting into subscribers & members vs. those who were just bouncing off the site.The net of our real-time observations was saving valuable advertising dollars for a startup right out of the gate. Now we are able, on an ongoing basis, to draw geographic market intelligence about “interest” in the uptown area from those who live outside of it, helping us to better target our paid efforts.
What’s best is that we can develop a hypothesis based on that data and then test it in real-time and adjust accordingly so the process becomes a cycle of real-time, long duration metrics and real-time again.
Woopra Example 2: Online Marketing
Some of the commerce driven sites I work on offer specials, give-aways and other incentives to a limited number of people. Using real-time notifications built into Woopra we can effectively monitor when our threshold has been reached based on any number of criteria. While it’s not uncommon for a system to automate the process of turning off a certain “deal” when a number of units has sold it can be useful for the site owner/operator to be alerted to that occurrence as a way of measuring the effectiveness of various marketing techniques which are being tested.
By getting real-time notifications we can rapidly test different traffic and marketing strategies in a very short period of time. This can be particularly effective during a product launch. Add to that the ability to see if return visitors are behind the hits and you can discern if the people you sent an email offer to (already on your list) are the ones taking advantage of your offer as opposed to other, or first time visitors, as it’s happening. It can also help you ensure you are taking care of your return customers.
From an commerce standpoint it real-time analytics can also help you identify “bottle-neck’s” in a system. Points in a transaction where clients are dropping out can be identified in real-time allowing a site administrator to make corrections to the pathway without having to sift through all of the historical data before figuring it out.
Watching pages (or searches) which get large amounts of data can also tell you whether or not specific information is being sought on your site possibly indicating a support issue which may need to be addressed.
From a commerce and customer support standpoint, there are a myriad of ways a real-time analytics can be put to use.
Woopra Example 3 – Online Publishing ROI
If you run a news or magazine style website then “up-to-date” information is right up your alley. Online publishers can get a great deal of information about what is happening on their site and cycle breaking news with content that is getting engaged, needs to stay above the fold or cycled out completely. Since news is such a time sensitive matter, real-time analytics can provide a wealth of information about what is happening, not only on their site but around the world. Geographic spikes can be a strong indicator that “something” is going on.
Woopra Example 4 – Risk Management
Knowing your visitor demographics and setting up notifications for anomalous behavior can be one of many possible risk mitigation strategies and is one of the more useful real-time applications even for very small sites. Perhaps you’re geographically focused but suddenly get a spike in traffic from somewhere outside that geography. While there might be several causes, an attack would not be out of the question, and at the very least, it is good to be in the know. But for smaller sites let’s assume you have a downloadable report that people buy or have to subscribe to get. It would be very helpful to get alerted to a number of sudden downloads of your product/report when that number doesn’t line up with the number of buyers/subscribers you have. That is a likely scenario that you have been in some way compromised and are losing business and opportunity. The more quickly you react, the better off you are.
While real-time is not essential for everyone there are benefits to having it as a tool for small and heavily trafficked sites. The real question is whether or not you are prepared to make use of that information not whether or not the information is useful. Real-time analytics can save you money, allow you to rapidly test campaigns, improve customer support and provide a competitive edge for sites which use them appropriately and integrate the real-time aspect of Woopra analytics into their business process with the supporting plan for acting on that information.
Special thanks to Lorelle VanFossen for providing constructive feedback on the writing of this post.
