I tried to sign up for Woopra last night and ran into some problems related to bad code on their site (lots of Java code in their JSPs and an improperly permissioned MySQL database).  It wouldn’t let me sign-in for a while and then I realized they didn’t really have a free account.  Doh!  But then last night I got an e-mail with an invitation code for one of the free accounts with a 250k page view limit.  My site doesn’t even come close to that so I figured let’s give it a go. They said the invitation code was to make-up for the problems signing up.  Pro-active customer support is the way to win my trust so I give Woopra thumbs up for that.

What does Woopra promise?  Real-time analytics is their biggest draw.  When I’ve used Google Analytics and CoreMetrics in the past both require you to wait until the next day for most analytics.  That is really annoying when you’re trying to see how a new promotion or feature is performing after you deploy it.

The client is built in Java so it’s cross-platform and on the surface it looks pretty slick.  As I started hitting my site from a few machines at home they showed up right away in the client.  I didn’t even have to hit refresh anywhere.  After I’ve had some time to look at traffic for a few days I’ll post some screenshots.  So far they have a lot of the same analytics that other packages such as Google and CoreMetrics like browser, OS, resolution, search referrals, etc.., however it reports it real time.  I have to say the real-time aspect is pretty damn cool.

I’m hoping someone posts some reports on how well it works and how useful the real time aspect is on a high traffic site.