I fear a coronary resuscitation may be needed momentarily. Two times in as many days I’ve been blown away by some fantastic revelation or other.

Yesterday it was the lightbulb moment/official convergence of Word And Mouth services into Conversaction.

Today it’s Woopra.com, and I’m screaming inside with unabashed delight.

Woopra, you see, [...]]]>

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I fear a coronary resuscitation may be needed momentarily. Two times in as many days I’ve been blown away by some fantastic revelation or other.

Yesterday it was the lightbulb moment/official convergence of Word And Mouth services into Conversaction.

Today it’s Woopra.com, and I’m screaming inside with unabashed delight.

Woopra, you see, marks what I believe will be an epiphany in helping the everyman understand website effectiveness.

I discovered Woopra via the TechCrunch RSS feed. Man, I gotta love NewsRob on the Android mobile phone platform – it’s brought me no end of inspirational geek stories…

Anyway, Woopra’s just come out of beta which means latecomers to the next-gen web analytics party can finally have a play.

It’s incredible.

• You can see how visitors are interacting with your site in REAL TIME!
• Start a live chat with individual visitors with no extra software needed
• Get an Event Notification when some action takes place on your site – first visitor to a page, or someone making a purchase, etc

It’s all facilitated by a desktop client that works pretty well right now, but is about to have a quasi-makeover to make it even better come November. The powers-that-be inform me personally that there are some more fab features in the pipeline too.

Now I know there’s no substitute for experience and knowledge of analytics and how to convert the figures into actionable insights; that’s not in doubt.

But Woopra goes a long way towards helping the layman get to grips with what’s happening on their website.

One of the things I find challenging about Google Analytics (GA) is correlating activity to campaigns. There’s an app out there whose name eludes me, that allows you to ‘tag’ dates in tandem with key events in your website’s evolution; Woopra goes one step further by integrating an easy to reference calendar in the desktop app so you can easily tally what happened, when, against your marketing schedule.

I’m in no way suggesting we have a Google Analytics-beater on our hands – I’m far too sceptical and patient a journalist to make a judgement call at this early stage in Woopra’s life. But what I can say is the dev team have gone about their testing phase in exactly the right way. The Woopra blog shows they respond to the needs of customers, and they’ve had a long enough beta to make sure that things are working across all platforms. So no missing out whether you’re Linux, Mac or plain ‘ole Windowsy.

And it will hopefully pave the way for people to stop obsessing over worthless ‘hits’ and deep dive into data with relatively little understanding of statistics. In fact if you want to grow into a role that includes being able to report with integrity on website data, this could well be the platform that facilitates your development.

To get in on the act right now you need either an invite (wink, wink – for free use up to a certain number of pageviews) or to sign up from $14.99 a month. It’s worth it, believe me.