We’ve been making a lot of quite obvious front end changes (like, overhauling our entire website) that are quite apparent to our users.  This is always exciting and it’s great to hear the feedback about the site but unfortunately for us, not everyone who visits the site emails us to tell us what they thought.  That’s where web analytics solutions come in and there are a lot of great tools out there to help understand how people interact with your website.  For example Google Analytics, the main tool that we use, lets us see how people who arrive at Spoonfed from different parts of the internet use the site.  We can see how long they spend on Spoonfed, how many pages they view, what those pages are, and lots of other really useful info.  Don’t worry, the data is all completely anonymous so we can’t see who is doing the visiting, just average numbers.  This is useful because we can see improvement (or not, but we hope that’s not the case) as we make changes to the site.

A few weeks ago, we got invited to join the beta testing phase of a new analytics software called Woopra which completely changes the way we understand how visitors are using the site.  Google Analytics is very thorough but tends to take about 24 hours to update completely while Woopra shows instantly who’s using the site and what pages they’re viewing (still anonymously!).  This means we can see right away how advertising campaigns, posted links and site changes are doing.  One really nifty feature of Woopra is the ability to send a message to someone viewing the site.  They don’t need any software, but as a webmaster, we can send a popup to their screen that asks if they’d like to chat.  We can ask them questions about the site, get feedback on features, and engage with the people using the site.

Alright, so to be honest we find that feature just a little creepy (imagine browing a website and getting a popup that says “The Webmaster wants to chat!”) but if you’re feeling adventurous, click around a few pages on the blog and you might just get a popup note from me asking how you’re enjoying the Spoonfed Flavour blog.

In the meantime, check out Woopra.  Beyond the instant data and webmaster chat, it’s got some other really cool features and it’s definitely worth a look for anyone interested in how web analytics are tracked.