I meet a lot of people who say that Google Analytics (GA) does not provide enough depth for proper website traffic analysis. However, I still believe that GA is an excellent tool and I doubt that the depth of data provided by tools like Webtrends is actually useful for 99% of site owners. Web traffic analysis is a time consuming business and unless you put in the resource, most of the data available is wasted. GA does a great job of focusing on the stats that lead to the big learnings about your site and its traffic. You’ve got to walk before you can run.

Having said all of that, it is slightly worrying that GA dominates the analytics market so much. It’s important to keep Google on their toes. A new entrant to the market is doing just that: Woopra. Just like GA, Woopra provides a really intuitive and simple graphical interface. It’s also easy to set up and currently free. But what’s it got to offer that GA doesn’t?

One of the neatest features that caught my eye is the ability to be alerted in real time when there is someone on your site. You can then initiate a chat with this visitor and discuss their experience on your site. I have yet to try this out but it sounds cool. I imagine that you’re more likely to glean valuable qualitative input from users like this rather than inviting them to do an online survey (we all have survey fatigue now so these are lot less powerful than they used to be). Similarly, it’s cheaper than focus groups – not to mention the fact that a focus group of web users is a somewhat artificial setting versus talking to someone who’s actually on your site for real life reasons at the moment that you are quizzing them. Very powerful… but I have no doubt the usefulness of this type of tool is down to how you use it; the questions you ask; and also your ability not to scare away your visitors.

Some of the other features on Woopra are the ability to “tag” visitors so that you can track individuals and analyse their behaviour. Great if you are trying to understand what leads people to register, buy, etc. This leads into another area they are focusing on – traffic analytics for Web 2.0. Providing meaningful stats for blogs, social networking sites and the like is a largely untapped and little understood market. Finally, there’s also the possibility to search your traffic data: for example, you can search for specific pages to go straight to traffic data about them – a time saving tool rather than having to drill down into the data click-by-click.

So Woopra looks very promising with some innovative features. There’s plenty more to Woopra than I’ve covered here. However, a big question mark is the cost. It’s free whilst still in Beta mode but they do plan to start charging when they go to full release. With GA such a powerful and free tool, Woopra are going to have to really wow the socks off site owners to get them to switch. It’s one that we’re watching closely at Content Formula to help us enhance our site management and site support services.