The Woopra Team is gathered in the Dallas, Texas, area for the first time in a long time without a virtual world between us. We working on the future of Woorpa and dealing with issues in the present.

We’ve been meeting with Woopra fans and members from the last weekend’s OpenCamp, August 27-29, 2010, and meeting with groups throughout this week. They are putting Woopra to the test and reporting bugs, hopes, and dreams, and testing some of the new features we’re working on.

We need your input and help.

We’ve got a lot of Woopra we’re working on, including the Woopra Desktop Client installed on your computer, the updated web analytics version, the Woopra iPhone App, Woopra WordPress Plugin, and other soon-to-be released plugins and add-ons. That’s a lot of woop to cover and we need your help.

This is the time to dig into each of these products and services and uncover what you like and not like about them. We need to know what you want to see more of or less. We need to know what you want us to provide you today and in the future. We’re gathered together going over your feedback for the past few years and we need your updated input.

It’s your turn. Let’s hear from you.

Woopra is proud to be a Platinum Level Sponsor for OpenCamp in Dallas, August 27-29, 2010. We’re also uniquely involved in the event.

On Saturday, August 28, an expert panel of Woopra users will be sharing their insights into how they use Woopra’s real-time analytics and live chat features for their online business. Led by long-time Woopra fan and producer of the No Fact Zone, DB Ferguson, the panel will cover SEO, visitor tracking, customer service with the Woopra Live Chat Widget, trends, custom reports tracking, and more.

The CEO of Woopra and co-producer of OpenCamp, John Pozadzides, explained how OpenCamp is using Woopra’s features as part of the preparation, planning, and strategy of the event:

All of this year’s OpenCamp organizers are using Woopra’s shared access so we can see as visitors come and go in real time on the OpenCamp site, tracking the response to news, tweets, articles, ads, and really see where our visitors are coming from. We’ve been able to talk to website owners driving traffic to our site about becoming more actively involved in the event. Since their audience is interested and signing up for the event, shouldn’t they have a presence as well?

In addition, you may notice the little Woopra Chat Widget in the footer area of every page on the OpenCamp site. This is the Woopra Live Chat Widget which allows you to click-to-chat with any available member of the team. We’ve had volunteers staffing the chat for the past two months, answering questions and guiding people in the right direction. We’ve walked people through registration, talked to potential sponsors, and have been able to instantly expand relationships with those who need a little more help or information than what’s on the page. It’s been an incredible experience for all our volunteers to feel intimately involved in the event participants way before the event begins.

John added that some members have been fighting over the “good time slots” just so they can use the feature to interact with the most visitors during active times.

The whole Woopra team will be at OpenCamp all weekend and would love to answer your questions or help you learn more about how Woopra works, and what you would like to see improved in Woopra. Come on down and say hello!

The Apple Store has just released the Woopra iPhone App and you can download it now to use on your iPhone.

Thanks to the incredible development work by Cesar Alaniz and the Woopra team, we’re really proud of the Woopra iPhone App. Here’s what you need to know.

1. Requirements: The Woopra iPhone App requires the Apple iOS4 operating system.
2. Woopra iPhone App is Free: We are currently offering the Woopra iPhone App for free, though it is an advertising supported application. Woopra customers upgrading to a paid plan will no longer see advertisements within either the desktop or iPhone applications. Premium accounts begin at only $4.95 per month and offer more features and functionality.
3. Support and Issues: We’ve tested the first release of the Woopra iPhone App across 3G, 3GS and 4G devices and it seems to be performing excellently. If you encounter any unusual behavior, or have feature requests, please report in the Woopra Forum Mobile Apps section.

The Woopra iPhone App currently features four core areas of Woopra tracking and data: Analytics, Live, Map, and Calendar. The key features are:

• Track visitors live
• Track visitors on Google Maps live
• View visitor data on the Google Live Maps
• See the Woopra Calendar daily stat summaries
• See basic Analytics segmentation on visitor and referrer data

This is the first development version of the Woopra iPhone App and we’re working on adding even more. If you have a feature you would like to see added, let us know in the Woopra Forum Mobile Apps section.

If you are new to Woopra:

1. Sign up for Woopra and add your website.
2. Install the Woopra JavaScript on your site.
3. Download and install the Woopra iPhone App from the Apple Store.

You should be able too begin tracking and viewing your site’s data and visitors in real-time.

1. Download and install the Woopra iPhone App from the Apple Store.

That’s it. You thought there was more?

Hey Woopra enthusiasts, we’ve got an opportunity for you to share your story for an article that Juan Martinez is working on for CRM Magazine.

Juan is working on a story about how people use Web chat in real world business situations, and he and I spoke for a while today about several scenarios in which it can be useful. As you can imagine I can only come up with so many ideas, so we wanted to open it up to the Woopra community and see what kind of new and creative ways that you guys are using chat capabilities!

One particular area of focus for Juan is in the area of “outbound” or proactive chat. In Woopra, this is when you use that little button that says, “Start Chat” to approach one of the visitors on your site.

So, if you’ve been using Woopra’s chat functionality, and you don’t mind potentially doing an interview with Juan for CRM Magazine, please respond to this blog post and share a few details! Here are a few points that would be of particular interest:

• What kind of a website are you using chat on? And what made you decide to use it?
• Why do you think more sites haven’t yet deployed web chat, or why haven’t they used more proactive/outbound chat?
• Can you give examples of how you are using Web chat? And what value do you perceive from using web chat?
• Can you give a specific example of how an outbound chat instance actually helped you close business, solve a customer issue, or delivered other value?

Juan will go through the responses and if you’ve provided enough detail he may just reference you from the blog post, or if he needs more info I’ll broker an email introduction between you based on the email address you leave in the comments.

I can’t wait to hear how everyone is using this feature!

Izzy Hyman and Tim Conley just launched Foolish Adventure, a blog and podcast about creating an online business. The first few hours of their launch was spent watching Woopra track their incoming traffic on the launch site. They edited hours of footage down to just over six minutes.

Their goal in the video is to get 1,000 subscribers. They watched the live number grow and the Live Panel map of visitors arriving. Within the first five minutes, they had 375 people visit with 129 live visitors at one time. They also watched the incoming visitors to track their referrers, tracking who was coming in from Twitter, other blogs, and social media sites. At 26 minutes, there were 941 total visitors and about 300 sign up for their newsletter. At one hour, they had 1,655 visits and 2,774 pageviews, with 457 signed up for their newsletter, moving towards the 1,000 at high speed. Two hours into the launch, 2,490 visits, 4,096 pageviews, and 655 sign ups. Their 1,000 newsletter sign up goal was reached nine hours after the launch with 4,653 total unique visitors and 7,587 pageviews. Impressive!

Congrats to them for hitting their goal with their new launch and sharing their Woopra experience with everyone!

While the team is still caught up in some of the crazy that comes with launching a startup, here are some of the things they can do and learn from Woopra to help them move forward and learn from their first day.

1. Measure Social Media Referrals: Using Reports > Analytics > Referrers, they can look at where they put their energy and what was the return on that coverage. Which worked better for them, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon…and which specific accounts. Did the Twitter traffic come from their account, or from retweets? Which account drove the most traffic and how can you tap that in the future?
2. Measure All Referrers: While many put their focus on social networks, what about email campaigns, newspaper or media coverage? What about online communities? Search engines? Where did all the traffic come from and how can they take advantage of the ones that worked, and improve the efforts that didn’t work?
3. Geography: Izzy and Tim are offering online business expertise and training. Why not plan to move from the online into the real world and possibly offer workshops or training programs? Looking at the Analytics > Visitors at the Countries and Cities over time, they can get a feeling for where their first stop might be.
4. Popular Pages: Currently, the team doesn’t have a lot of content. Their newsletter currently is designed to announce new blog posts with podcasts and helpful information, so there aren’t a lot of pages to track. Still, as they develop their content, the most popular pages are going to be the topics that are usually of the most value to their subscribers, so these will be pages they will want to keep updated and provide links to other content on their site. The ones with fewer views and traffic might be a clue they need to do some improvement in order to build up quality content.
5. Gateways: Checking Analytics > Pages > Landing Pages, they can determine which pages are the most popular entry pages, tracking the gateways to their site and ensuring they are most representative of their content, and ready to invite people to hang around and explore more.
6. Queries and Keywords: What are their subscribers and potential subscribers really looking for? As a training service, the Analytics > Searches > Queries/Keywords are very important to track search trends and queries. Are they really serving up what people are looking for?
7. Tracking Categories: The new Author and Category Tracking will work well with their WordPress blog and the Woopra WordPress Plugin, allowing them to track specific categories to find out where the most interest lies, and where interest lacks, building up their content accordingly.
8. Event Notifications: A Sign-up! Manage > Notifications can be set up to alert the team when someone signs up for the newsletter and when people land on a specific page such as their confirmation page. Instead of watching Woopra 24 hours a day, they can keep on working and still monitor their daily or weekly goals of new subscribers with customized alerts.

Once they get a feel for their audience, there are custom reports, filters, all kinds of things they can add to help them track what is going on. They can also add email reports to get daily or weekly custom updates on their stats, helping them keep track over time with easy-to-save and share reports.

Great work, guys, and glad you made your quote in such a short time! Thanks again for using Woopra to track the process.

If you have a Woopra experience you wish to share with us, let us know!

Wow! I’ve got some of the biggest news for the Woopra WordPress Plugin users in a long time! Today we’ve released a brand new version, Woopra WordPress Plugin 1.4.7, which incorporates the ability to keep track of Authors and Categories for reporting purposes!

You can download Woopra WordPress Plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory. If you have been using an old version, we recommend that you use FTP to delete the old directory and upload the new version manually. You can try the auto-upgrade, but we recommend a clean install for this version, especially if you have been getting errors in the past. If you had errors and chose to install Woopra manually, please remove the Woopra JavaScript from your WordPress Theme first, then install the Woopra WordPress Plugin to avoid double stats.

To enable Author and Category tracking, after upgrading the WordPress Plugin:

1. Go to Settings > Woopra and select the Track Authors and Categories option. Save the settings.
2. In the Woopra Desktop Client installed on your computer, go to Analytics > Custom > Add Analysis.
3. Create a new Custom Event and name it, for instance, “Authors” and select “Custom Events.”
4. Enter the key name “author” in the form. The word must be singular and all in lowercase.
5. Click Add Analysis.
6. The report is now added to your Custom Reports and Analysis list.

This feature is fantastic for anyone running a multi-author blog because it now allows you to keep track of each author’s total page views separately! For example, here is a sample from the GeekBeat.TV blog after being run for a few hours:

But wait, there’s more! You can do the same thing for Categories on your blog, giving you a chance to really see what are the hottest topics for your visitors.

Using the above method, set the Custom Analysis report name as “Categories” and use the key “category”. After you save it, the report should generate immediately in the Custom Reports panel!

What if you are not running WordPress? The good news is that this is also available to you. This is new core functionality is now built into Woopra and ready for everyone to try. You’ve got two options for making this work on your site.

1. If you are using a different CMS, hunt down the Plugin, script, or add-on developer and send them a link to the post and ask them to update their plugin. We’ll give them assistance if necessary, just invite them to join our Woopra Forums.
2. If you are a coder, check out our updated JavaScript Guide to see how to implement these in your custom code or plugin.

Have fun with your new reporting functionality. We’re eager to hear the lessons learned from tracking this new data. If you would like more features added to the Woopra WordPress Plugin, your feedback is also welcome. We’re working on it constantly and look for your input on helping us improve it.

In addition to adding categories and authors to the Woopra WordPress Plugin, a lot of bugs have been stomped to the ground, including one associated with server issues for a few running older web hosting setups. We’ve also improved support for custom tracking with the Woopra JavaScript. We’ll be improving even more on this in the future, so let us know what type of events you wish to be tracked in your custom reports.

Also, give a round of applause to our intern, Mario Achkar who has been working overtime on updating the WordPress Plugin and helping us with some other innovative and exciting projects coming to Woopra very soon.

John Pozadzides, CEO of Woopra, published “Analysis: What are the Web’s Top Sources of Referral Traffic?” on ReadWriteWeb showcasing how Woopra was used for recent research for RWW on the real impact of social media on your web traffic.

If there’s one thing we know about Web authors it’s that they are constantly seeking new sources of traffic for their content. It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger, a marketing manager or a small business owner, there is simply no reason to invest time with content creation and Web design if no one is coming to read it. For this reason, it’s important to figure out where to actually invest time for the greatest ROI.

…the Woopra team provided me with the raw information that I used to create the charts below. This report is based on hundreds of millions of data points collected during the month of June 2010.

Virtually every category of Website is represented in the dataset – education, news, government, SMB, Fortune 500, blogs, adult – and while it clearly doesn’t reflect all of the sites on the Internet, my guess is that it is a statistically significant and representative sampling.

The results analyze the top referrers of traffic, social network referrers, social bookmark referrers, search referrers, and media referrers with some very surprising results.

“I am constantly being asked by CEOs, VP’s of Marketing, Bloggers, and Social Media experts where they should focus their efforts for the greatest ROI. The problem is, no one can really give a definitive fact-based answer without having access to a very wide data set. And of course, virtually no one actually has access to a very wide data set!” explains John P.

“When I gave it some thought I figured that it was almost my obligation to compile the report since others weren’t able to, and the Woopra team was extremely happy to help the community by doing the work necessary to support the research.”

All this research resulted in ReadWriteWeb’s article “StumbleUpon: The Silent Social Media Success Story” which uncovered the impact of StumbleUpon, a hot new driving force on the social media scene.

When you think of social media, two products immediately come to mind: Facebook and Twitter. If you’re in the technical world, you’d probably also mention Digg and Slashdot. A product that is rarely talked about among social media products, but has a surprisingly large footprint on the Web, is StumbleUpon. It now has 10.6 million users and regularly pushes big traffic to online publishers.

According to a new analysis by Web analytics company Woopra, StumbleUpon drives nearly twice as much traffic than Digg. StatCounter uncovered a similar trend recently, with StumbleUpon second only to Facebook among social media traffic drivers.

According to Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb, noted that according to Woopra “92% of search visitors originate from Google. This is much higher than Hitwise reports.”

Hey folks, if you weren’t aware yet, the .CO domain names have now been released and people are registering them like crazy!

I would highly recommend that you go and at the very least pick up your primary domain name with a .CO address before someone else grabs it to take advantage of your visitors who forget the M on your .COM address (can you say “domain squatting”?).

Everyone I know uses GoDaddy (so do we) so head on over to GoDaddy now and get your domain. There are also still a LOT of other great names up for grabs so if you’ve been wanting one for a while and all the .COMs were taken you might invest a little time and money in a few choice names for later use.

Here are some Coupon Codes you can use when its time to checkout:

• IAPt3 = 10% off
• IAPtfif1 = 15% off $75
• IAPtft1 = $5 off $30
• IAPtdom1 = $7.49 .com
• IAPth1 = 20% off hosting

Good luck with your domain hunt! Don’t forget we also have discount codes for other GoDaddy domains and more. And tweet me to @johnpoz if you get anything awesome! I’d love to hear about it!