We’ve also fixed a few minor bugs that existed with custom event tracking and server hosts using PHP 5.3.
The Woopra WordPress Plugin permits live tracking and simple analytics and customization from within the WordPress Administration Panels, making it a one-stop statistics and analytics Plugin.
If you are currently using the older version of the Woopra WordPress Plugin, use the automatic Plugin upgrade feature with WordPress. The Woopra WordPress Plugin works with WordPress versions and Themes updated to WordPress 2.9 or later.
If you have been using the manual installation of the Woopra JavaScript on your Theme, edit the Theme’s footer.php according to the manual instructions for installing Woopra on WordPress sites and remove the JavaScript. Install the Woopra WordPress Plugin.
For more information on the Woopra WordPress Plugin, see the installation guide and these past announcements.
By Lorelle, on August 10th, 2010,source http://woopra.com
Izzy Hyman and Tim Conley just launched Foolish Adventure, a blog and podcast about creating an online business. The first few hours of their launch was spent watching Woopra track their incoming traffic on the launch site. They edited hours of footage down to just over six minutes.
Their goal in the video is to get 1,000 subscribers. They watched the live number grow and the Live Panel map of visitors arriving. Within the first five minutes, they had 375 people visit with 129 live visitors at one time. They also watched the incoming visitors to track their referrers, tracking who was coming in from Twitter, other blogs, and social media sites. At 26 minutes, there were 941 total visitors and about 300 sign up for their newsletter. At one hour, they had 1,655 visits and 2,774 pageviews, with 457 signed up for their newsletter, moving towards the 1,000 at high speed. Two hours into the launch, 2,490 visits, 4,096 pageviews, and 655 sign ups. Their 1,000 newsletter sign up goal was reached nine hours after the launch with 4,653 total unique visitors and 7,587 pageviews. Impressive!
Congrats to them for hitting their goal with their new launch and sharing their Woopra experience with everyone!
Learning the Lessons
While the team is still caught up in some of the crazy that comes with launching a startup, here are some of the things they can do and learn from Woopra to help them move forward and learn from their first day.
Measure Social Media Referrals: Using Reports > Analytics > Referrers, they can look at where they put their energy and what was the return on that coverage. Which worked better for them, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon…and which specific accounts. Did the Twitter traffic come from their account, or from retweets? Which account drove the most traffic and how can you tap that in the future?
Measure All Referrers: While many put their focus on social networks, what about email campaigns, newspaper or media coverage? What about online communities? Search engines? Where did all the traffic come from and how can they take advantage of the ones that worked, and improve the efforts that didn’t work?
Geography: Izzy and Tim are offering online business expertise and training. Why not plan to move from the online into the real world and possibly offer workshops or training programs? Looking at the Analytics > Visitors at the Countries and Cities over time, they can get a feeling for where their first stop might be.
Popular Pages: Currently, the team doesn’t have a lot of content. Their newsletter currently is designed to announce new blog posts with podcasts and helpful information, so there aren’t a lot of pages to track. Still, as they develop their content, the most popular pages are going to be the topics that are usually of the most value to their subscribers, so these will be pages they will want to keep updated and provide links to other content on their site. The ones with fewer views and traffic might be a clue they need to do some improvement in order to build up quality content.
Gateways: Checking Analytics > Pages > Landing Pages, they can determine which pages are the most popular entry pages, tracking the gateways to their site and ensuring they are most representative of their content, and ready to invite people to hang around and explore more.
Queries and Keywords: What are their subscribers and potential subscribers really looking for? As a training service, the Analytics > Searches > Queries/Keywords are very important to track search trends and queries. Are they really serving up what people are looking for?
Tracking Categories: The new Author and Category Tracking will work well with their WordPress blog and the Woopra WordPress Plugin, allowing them to track specific categories to find out where the most interest lies, and where interest lacks, building up their content accordingly.
Event Notifications: A Sign-up!Manage > Notifications can be set up to alert the team when someone signs up for the newsletter and when people land on a specific page such as their confirmation page. Instead of watching Woopra 24 hours a day, they can keep on working and still monitor their daily or weekly goals of new subscribers with customized alerts.
Once they get a feel for their audience, there are custom reports, filters, all kinds of things they can add to help them track what is going on. They can also add email reports to get daily or weekly custom updates on their stats, helping them keep track over time with easy-to-save and share reports.
Great work, guys, and glad you made your quote in such a short time! Thanks again for using Woopra to track the process.
If you have a Woopra experience you wish to share with us, let us know!
By John P., on July 30th, 2010,source http://woopra.com
Wow! I’ve got some of the biggest news for the Woopra WordPress Plugin users in a long time! Today we’ve released a brand new version, Woopra WordPress Plugin 1.4.7, which incorporates the ability to keep track of Authors and Categories for reporting purposes!
You can download Woopra WordPress Plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory. If you have been using an old version, we recommend that you use FTP to delete the old directory and upload the new version manually. You can try the auto-upgrade, but we recommend a clean install for this version, especially if you have been getting errors in the past. If you had errors and chose to install Woopra manually, please remove the Woopra JavaScript from your WordPress Theme first, then install the Woopra WordPress Plugin to avoid double stats.
Author Tracking
To enable Author and Category tracking, after upgrading the WordPress Plugin:
Go to Settings > Woopra and select the Track Authors and Categories option. Save the settings.
In the Woopra Desktop Client installed on your computer, go to Analytics > Custom > Add Analysis.
Create a new Custom Event and name it, for instance, “Authors” and select “Custom Events.”
Enter the key name “author” in the form. The word must be singular and all in lowercase.
Click Add Analysis.
The report is now added to your Custom Reports and Analysis list.
This feature is fantastic for anyone running a multi-author blog because it now allows you to keep track of each author’s total page views separately! For example, here is a sample from the GeekBeat.TV blog after being run for a few hours:
Category Tracking
But wait, there’s more! You can do the same thing for Categories on your blog, giving you a chance to really see what are the hottest topics for your visitors.
Using the above method, set the Custom Analysis report name as “Categories” and use the key “category”. After you save it, the report should generate immediately in the Custom Reports panel!
For Non-WordPress Users
What if you are not running WordPress? The good news is that this is also available to you. This is new core functionality is now built into Woopra and ready for everyone to try. You’ve got two options for making this work on your site.
If you are using a different CMS, hunt down the Plugin, script, or add-on developer and send them a link to the post and ask them to update their plugin. We’ll give them assistance if necessary, just invite them to join our Woopra Forums.
If you are a coder, check out our updated JavaScript Guide to see how to implement these in your custom code or plugin.
Have fun with your new reporting functionality. We’re eager to hear the lessons learned from tracking this new data. If you would like more features added to the Woopra WordPress Plugin, your feedback is also welcome. We’re working on it constantly and look for your input on helping us improve it.
Other Improvements
In addition to adding categories and authors to the Woopra WordPress Plugin, a lot of bugs have been stomped to the ground, including one associated with server issues for a few running older web hosting setups. We’ve also improved support for custom tracking with the Woopra JavaScript. We’ll be improving even more on this in the future, so let us know what type of events you wish to be tracked in your custom reports.
By Toff Ward, on July 6th, 2010,source http://opensourcemarketer.com
The good ol’ admin account.
Every website has one, and WordPress installs it by default. Therefore everyone who wants to hack your site knows exactly what account to try for.
But, what if you didn’t use that name?
Seriously, if everyone changed the location of their car’s ignition switch, wouldn’t it suck to be a car thief? Imagine how long it would take if every time someone tried to steal a car, they had to strip search the whole car to find out where to start it.
Default means just that. You don’t have to use it, the system just needs something to use if you don’t select what you want. Hosting companies often use Fantastico to install WordPress and just above the “install WordPress” button, you have the option of changing the account name to whatever you want. You don’t have to take the default. WordPress doesn’t care what account name you use. As long as you have a name to use, WordPress is fine and happy.
Maybe you want the administrative account to reflect your philosophy on computers in general such as “HatezThisDamnThing” or go with a more Native American naming structure such as “SlapsMeInTheHeadALot”, “DancesWithSlackers” and even “PaidALotaLoot”.
It’s your business and your system. Have fun with your security protocols. You don’t have to be the military or government to be paranoid. Paranoia is totally non-discriminatory.
Of course, if you REALLY want to have fun with this, you can hide the login screen altogether. After all, why hide the lock, when you can hide the entire door?
Stealth-Login is a WordPress plugin that accomplishes this. You can make your login page use whatever link you want. No need to give out the location, just make up the URL anything you want and that will be the new login page.
Your website is your party.
When someone tries to use their car keys to open the back door of your house and take it around the block for a spin, move the handle on that door and make them wonder where you put it.
By Cammie Swegman, on July 5th, 2010,source http://ipresort.com
On August 27, 2010, we are attending an historic event in Addison, TX. It’s called OpenCamp, and if you are a webmaster, web developer, blogger, podcaster, social media enthusiast or someone who is interested in web content creation you should be there too.
OpenCamp is the first multi-platform web conference to be held in the Southwest, and some of the most notable people on the web are speaking there.
Doug Vann who travels all over sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm for Drupal
Chris Pirillo founder of the blogging platform Lockergnome, is a Tech Expert on CNN, and is on the Board of Directors for UstreamTV
Trey Ratcliff whose travel photography blog “stuckincustoms.com” is the #1 blog of it’s kind on the net, getting approximately 350,000 visits per month
Unlike other conferences that focus on only one platform, there will be sessions on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Blogger and many other tools for web development. In addition to the various content platform sessions there will be general sessions regarding best web practices. There will also be parties, networking, information sharing and the opportunity to make lots of new friends who share your passion for the endless possibilities provided by the Internet.
If you are not familiar with Addison, TX, you should know that it is a beautiful suburb of Dallas and attendees of OpenCamp are encouraged to book a room at the newly renovated Crowne Plaza Hotel in Addison, where there will be parties as well as the learning sessions. Rooms are very affordable if you book while the OpenCamp block is still available. They are also quite nice. You can take a video tour of the hotel here (scroll about halfway down the page): http://openca.mp/blog/get-a-tour-inside-the-opencamp-venue-video/
If you’ve been reading our blog posts, you know that last year we attended WordCamp Dallas, which was truly an impressive event. But this year’s OpenCamp promises to be even better and we can’t wait!
Hosting companies often use Fantastico to install WordPress and just above the “install WordPress” button, you have the option of changing the account name to whatever you want. You don’t have to take the default. WordPress doesn’t care what account name you use. As long as you have a name to use, WordPress is fine and happy.
