---
title: "WordPress Tip: Woopra — Enough Live Site Stats to Write a Dissertation"
date: 2008-07-08
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2008/07/08/woopra-enough-live-site-stats-to-write-a-dissertation/
---
# WordPress Tip: Woopra — Enough Live Site Stats to Write a Dissertation
[Woopra](http://woopra.com) is a new website analytics tracking tool that gives you enough live stats to write a dissertation. It takes analytics tracking a step further than Google Analytics and allows you to see a live map of visitors on your site — what they're reading, what paths they've taken, what country they're from, how long they've been on your site, and so on.

If visitors have left a comment and haven't cleared the cookies in their browser, they even appear in Woopra by name, and you can see them. One reviewer said this capability from Woopra allows you to "stalk your visitors."

[![](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/woopra2.png)](http://www.woopra.com)

I've been using Woopra for the past month or so to track site stats. I also have Google Analytics tracking my site. To be honest, Woopra is about ten times more fun than Google Analytics because it appeases the desire we have to observe someone reading our content in real time.

Writers often talk of chance run-ins on trains where they coincidentally sit beside someone reading their novel, gleefully watching someone reading in the act. Woopra gives you a little of the same joy — you can see what people are reading on your site at the moment.

But it's more than that. What Woopra will teach you is rather surprising. Web stats are a scary beast to peer under. Often your readers are only Google searchers, first-timers on your blog, there for less than a minute, never subscribing to your feed or leaving comments. They are largely information feeders whose anonymity remains hidden in the dark web.

You can reach out and initiate contact with these readers through Woopra's chat feature — a rather brazen, unexpected event that catches them by surprise. Still the majority of information feeders on your site either never see the Woopra chat window or don't care to engage.

In this post, I'll give you a little tour of Woopra and also outline 10 unexpected realizations from analyzing site stats.

### A Tour of Woopra

Woopra is a locally installed client on your machine. It's free during the beta, but you're limited to tracking 10,000 visitors at a time. If you have WordPress, you can install the tracking code throughout your site with a little plugin. If you have another blog platform, you may have to manually add a tracking code to each page.

Woopra's interface is a bit like a pilot's cockpit — lots of numbers crammed together in a tight space. It will not surprise you that the developer felt the creation was entirely intuitive and so omitted the help file. (By the way, for all those people who always ask me how to break into technical writing, here's your chance to write a help file that will be used by thousands!)

### Woopra Tutorial -- 20 minute Video

I made a [20 minute video tutorial](https://idratherbewriting.com/podcasts/woopraflvhighquality/woopraflvhighquality.html) about Woopra. Click the image below to view the tutorial.

[![Woopra tutorial](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/woopratutorial4.gif)](https://idratherbewriting.com/podcasts/woopraflvhighquality/woopraflvhighquality.html)