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Every story, article, column, piece, and so forth on World of Matticus ever published.

Woopra: Not Your Mom’s Google Analytics

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Note: Not a WoW related post. You may mark as read. If you’re interested in learning how to stalk your readers, you may continue.

One of the few pleasures a blogger can take is to simply stare at their stats as they go up (or down). Think of it as damage meters for bloggers. In the past, I’ve used Google Analytics to examine and watch for trends on my blog. There’s a lot of useful information you can gather if you know how to make sense of it. I know there has to be some bloggers out there who have all these details statistical tools at their disposal yet have no idea how to utilize it and make sense of it.

Don’t worry! I’m here to teach!

Enter Woopra

Woopra is a program that allows you to track all sorts of crazy stuff about your readers. I caught wind of it several weeks ago and I didn’t believe it was true. Naturally my curiosity got the best of me and I grabbed it and installed it.

The installation process consists of two parts:

  • Installing a script or plugin on your blog
  • Downloading the software

After that, you need to set up an account with Woopra and twiddle your thumbs until they approve of your blog. There doesn’t appear to be any criteria. The limitations are purely technical. They’re slowly expanding their servers to handle the load, however.

Anyways, lets get more indepth into what this sucker can do. Click the images to expand their size.

woopra-1

This is the dashboard. It’s the first thing you see when you login from the client. It gives you a great overview of things that you want to know right away. The line graph on top shows you unique hits (in green) and page views (in yellow). If you’re interested in the hard numbers, the top left window shows you what your hits look like in the past few weeks. The window on the right displays the pages that have been viewed today. The windows on the bottom show your referrers, searches that people have used to find your blog and geographical locations of your visitors.

 

woopra-2This is the live portion of your blog. You can track in real time who is visiting your blog and what pages they are going to. It also shows the specs and platform of what your visitors are using when they view your blog. Here’s an example of me visiting my blog. It shows country and city of origin, OS language, local time, browser, and screen resolution. This information becomes important later on. I’ll explain why in a moment.

 

This is the analytics portion of Woopra. This shows traffic levels on a day to day basis. It’s a brief overview of your hits. It tells you the amount of time spent per page, how many new visitors you’ve picked up, unique hits, and total page views. It even tags your visitors with the names they leave when they comment. There’s even a systems section which tracks what your users are using to view your blog in bulk.

For example, if you know that over 85% of your visitors view your blog on a resolution 1024 x 768, you can factor this into your blog’s design – namely that your blog’s width should not exceed 1024 pixels to ensure maximum readability.

It also pays to ensure that your blog is useable on different browser platforms. 45% of readers to World of Matticus read on Firefox 2 and 43% read on Internet Explorer. The rest use a combination of Opera, Mozilla, or Safari.

This section is where you can start making some generalizations and realizations about your blog. The tab here shows information like your most popular pages, landing pages, exit pages, and outgoing links.

What can I learn here? I can tell the most popular pages I have are ones involving stats. They’re great for drawing search engine traffic to your WoW blog. No one really wants to go through the effort of cross referencing WoW DB and their character to figure out what gear they should shoot for. Instead, they turn to google hoping that some other poor sucker (a la me) has done the work for them.

Landing pages refer to the first page that your visitors land on when they load your blog. It’s not always the main page. It could be a link to one of your posts from a different blogger. Knowing this, you can spend a bit more time on what people seem to land on the most and develop and make it more attractive. I could add a little note to my Holy Priest gear page and ask new visitors to subscribe or "if they like this, why not check out my Kara requirements post?" kind of thing.

Exit pages are the exact opposite. They refer to the page your visitors are on before they navigate away. You might want to stick a note at the bottom of the post that says something like "thanks for visiting, please come again!" or some such.

Outgoing links are fairly self explanatory. It measures what your visitors seem to click on the most when they want to escape from your blog.

Here’s a graphical interpretation of referrals. There’s different sorts. It can track referrals by direct links, search engines, feed readers, emails, social bookmarks, and social networks. A funny note is that I appear to have gotten more hits from Master Ratshag and Egotistical Priest individually then WoW Insider today. It’s a neat way of realizing where your traffic is coming from so you can reciprocate in kind.

I like the social networks part because I think this is the first tool that tracks inbound links from my Twitter and my Facebook.

Lastly, you can see what your readers are typing in search engines to find your blog. From this list, I can see that most of my traffic comes from people looking up Priest gear or raiding requirements for Zul’Aman and Karazhan. Sure enough, a quick search for Holy Priest gear ranks my list as the top result.

In summary

If used properly and strategically, Woopra can be a tremendous asset. It can tell you key information such as:

  • Best time to publish a post
  • Visitor information that can be useful for your next redesign
  • Search engine trends
  • What your visitors deem popular
  • Which sites to suck up to 😉

Obligatory Female-Perspective Post or Introducing Wynthea

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Urban legends and media coverage both paint the stereotypical WoW-player as a pale, socially-stunted, acne-prone guy in his twenties. He might be in college, or live with his parents, or both. If he has graduated, he probably works in a computer-related field. Either way, the closest he’s gotten to female companionship is his level 28 NE-hunter alt and some lipstick on his hand.

Hi, my name is Ariel. You can call me Wynthea. I work in the finance industry, and live in a chic apartment of my own. I like to cook, swing-dance, pump iron, and watch obscure films. I speak three languages. I think that my red hair should serve as a warning to others. I play WoW. Better than you, and better than your boyfriend.

A girl playing Warcraft for her own reasons is unusual – most of us play to spend time with a boyfriend or family member. I’ve been told that we bring a different perspective to the guilds we lead and the raids we run. As is true in every competitive social and professional setting, we face a unique set of interactions and challenges, which has been well-documented elsewhere. I won’t bore you with tales of harassment, discrimination, or disappointment. It suffices to say that I’ve been called worse, questioned more, and respected by better. And I’m still here. Still playing, still progressing, and still learning.

Occasionally, I like to share a bit of what I’ve been taught, but more than that I like to brainstorm with like-minded players. Through a few lucky clicks, I found the World of Matticus, and started commenting. It was an ironic coincidence when eHarmony’s blog-buddy finder matched us up as sworn enemies. We had a good laugh about it, after the pirate gremlins saved me from his death-ray. Mostly, I sit on vent and listen to Matt whine about not having enough reagents, or forgetting where he hot-keyed Stoneform and Desperate Prayer. In return, he keeps me from screaming at my raid leader and catching a fast G-kick. I’m honored and flattered that Matt has invited me to add a little bit of my perspective to his World. He needs my presence so his sanity doesn’t get lost.

Street Cred

I have two level 70 Priests, one leveled Holy, one Shadow. Both are now Holy-CoH spec.

Renwein of Darrowmere (Human) – moth-balled since 2.3; made it 3/4 TK and 5/6 SSC, runs an occasional weekend-ZA.

Wynthea of Nazjatar (Troll) – Slayer of Illidan and countless gnomes. Red mohawk of DOOM.

My true love in this game is PvE, but I’ve dabbled more and more in PvP – the quickness of an arena match is a good nerve-soother when hours in a raid get to be too much. I have no real PvP claims to fame, but I’ll brag about them when I achieve them.

Council Down, Crosshairs on Illidan

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council

It was certainly quite the intense campaign. The first several wipes of the night were my fault. 3 wipes, and I suffered 8 deaths. Why? Because I’m way too slow and sluggish and I got suckered by the Rogue several times. No big deal before I repositioned myself on the far right on top of the stairs and just did laps around the area.

Highlights of the Night

Our first kill involved one of our Warlocks being locked out because he was on the wrong side of the door. Ergo, we had no choice but to 24 man him. I thought we were going to wipe because we had one less DPS but it turns out I had nothing to worry about.

This is nothing more than a straight up survival and endurance fight. As a CoH Priest, I was uniquely suited to run around and heal ranged DPS or melee DPS if it was needed.

After the kill, we paid a quick visit to Hyjal…

…and wiped to Rage. After being in BT for so long, it seemed as if we had lost our raid legs in Hyjal. No worries! Got him down in the next attempt after our Holy Paladin randomly DI’d a Druid. Thank goodness it wasn’t the main tank.

And now it all ends here. I started Karazhan last year around February. I did not expect to see Illidan at all. I’ve trained long and hard for this opportunity. Every boss up to this point had a lesson to teach. It won’t be easy, but we’ll sure as hell give him a bloody nose.

I want to give a very special shout out and thank you to reader Wynthea. She stayed up late last night helping me plan the different healing roles. She talked me through the encounter as it was happening ensuring I didn’t lose my cool. Without her help, Illidari Council will have taken another week or two. I’m in your debt.

So. Whose got some Illidan Priestly pointers?

Mother Shahraz Down, Crosshairs on Illidari Council

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Mother is too easy. We 2 shot her. If anything, the trash leading up to Mother was a pain. How quaint and ironic it is that we downed her on Mother’s day. Having capped our Shadow Resist helped incredibly.

Installing EasyMother made this fight a piece of cake.

Illidari Council

When Carnage first started raiding, we had minor difficulty on High King. We entered the caverns of Serpentshrine and manhandled Fathom-Lord and his lackeys. Following that, we infiltrated Tempest Keep and surprised Kael along with his advisors. Now we end up at the last of the multi-mob encounter before Sunwell: Illidari Council.

Healer Arsenal

2 Holy Priests (1 CoH, 1 Imp DS)
1 Resto Druid
4 Paladins
1 Resto Shaman

After 3 hours of wiping, I can say with absolute certainty that I want to bring in another healer for the time being.

2 Paladins and 1 Resto druid assigned to Gathaios tank
1 Imp Ds Priest on the mage tank
1 Paladin on the Rogue tank
1 Paladin on the Priest tank
1 CoH Priest on the melee group, the raid, and the tanks whenever possible
1 Shaman on the raid

And we’re still dying. Even after I devote myself to paying more attention to the Divine Wrath and Poison damages that ensue, we’re still dying. This is an endurance encounter, it appears to me. The enrage timer is like 14 minutes.

Cause of Wipe

The two things that lead to our demise:

  • Tank death: Specifically, the Paladin tank can dish out 17k damage within 1 second. He gets gibbed.
  • Raid buckling: We lose a player to a blizzard or a flame strike, or a combination of the Divine Wrath and poison. This player is usually someone important who is kicking or interrupting. Another player tries to compensate before another one goes down. Eventually, we lose this battle of attrition and our raid starts to slowly buckle before a wipe is called seconds later.

I really want another healer. I think that would help ease the pressure a little.