Your Site Deserves Great Realtime Statistics!

I have been using Google Analytics for a long time and it gives me great information and history, but there is something really awesome about live stats. Without it if you really want to know how a post or a tweet affects your traffic, you have to keep really good track of what you are doing and when. Then take the time to analyze that data. Live stats let you track your impact right away.

Move out Google Analytics, move in Woopra.

Woopra is another analytics service but they offer a slightly more detailed look at your stats. Live view is one of the most impressive things that I have seen for web stats and with a little work and tweaking I managed to up my page views by 1000% yesterday.

This service is not free across the board however. It is based on page views and if you are over 30,000 then you have to pay for the service. Most people are under that and that means that it’s a viable solution for the little guy. I truly believe that you can gather enough money from Adsence to pay for this if you have that many hits.

They also have a client program that you can download which is even better then their web interface. You can remain logged in which allows you to view your current status or any history when you like. AWESOME!

One thing that I have noticed that screwed me up a little was my time zone setting. By default it is set to UTC so if you are somewhere else you really want to change that. The problem I had was that it didn’t take affect when I set up my URL the first time. Then my reports reset at 7pm which was annoying, especially yesterday!

I still like to have my Google Analytics setup and the code remains in my html for now. Google is pretty much a standard when it comes to this information so I like it to be there. I am not sure if Woopra will be around forever so I like to have my information in more than one place. It’s almost like a backup copy of my stats, like they say “Data doesn’t exist until it exists in 2 places”.

Have fun with it, if you have 100 hits a day then it starts to get a little addictive ;)

Geek on!