So, some of the buzz coming out of WordCamp - Dallas was for a new web analytics product called “Woopra” - a Java-based analytics app.

According to my email, I signed up on March 30, 2008 - 14 days ago. At the time, I was unable to configure a site because although I could register for the service, setting up a site required an invitation - which I didn’t have and there were no instructions for getting one. The next day, the invitation was made ‘optional’ so I was able to add this site. However, adding the site just sent me into a queue and I received the message that I would hear back regarding site approval within 7 days - this was 13 days ago.

Two or three days ago (don’t remember which since it was a form on woopra.com and I didn’t receive even an automated recognition of the submission) I sent a support request via the woopra website asking for a status on the site approval. Nope, haven’t heard a word.

I was just cruising the forums over at woopra and there’s a whole topic dedicated to the approval timeline. According to CEO John Pozadzides, Woopra is too busy with other things like a site redesign, bug fixes and infrastructure scaling to take care of approvals - or customer service apparently.

I’m a web analyst and I like to evaluate web analytics packages when I can, I’ve had as many as six running on this site concurrently (don’t try that at home - it’s like going down the rabbit hole not to mention the impact to load times) seeing how things work and blogging about them from time to time.

Of course, with Woopra so far behind the customer service curve I’m just peeved enough to write a review with the information I have at hand.

Woopra had set my expectation for one week, in one week after sign up I was to know the status of my approval. Seven days came and went and there has been no communication. No resetting of my expectations no “Woops! We’re sorry” - not a peep.

So, it would seem that the folks at Woopra weren’t prepared for their launch and are managing poorly. Instead of focusing - at least a little - on managing mine, and others’ expectations as well as other aspects of customer service they are busy launching a redesign a couple of weeks after their launch.

How would I rate Woopra so far?

• Technology: UNK
• Core Reporting: UNK
• Segmentation: UNK
• Campaign Analysis: UNK
• Intra-Page Event Analysis: UNK
• ECommerce Analysis: UNK
• Multimedia Analysis: UNK
• Data Visualization & Exploration: UNK
• Customer Service: Non Existent

I also checked their official blog and there’s no discussion of the approval process or problems nor is it discussed in the FAQ so it would seem that the only place to talk about it is in the forum since support requests seem to be in an endless queue.

I found one of the co-founders on Twitter and there’s no discussion there about how the flood of sign-ups has derailed their customer service. I wonder what @jowyang would say about their apparent lack of social media strategy and management?

I guess my point is this: Even if you (or Woopra) think of yourselves as a technology company, at the end of the day people use the technology and you need to spend at least the same amount of time on us, your customers (or potential customers), as you do on your technology and service and I’m not feeling that at the moment.

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Has anyone else signed up for Woopra and gotten a site approved (since the launch at WordCamp)?

Anyone in on the private beta beforehand that would like to tell us about the service?

Avinash posted today on “Leveraging Statistical Control Limits” in web analytics as a way to cut out the noise in your KPIs and therefore being able to focus on the true outliers - data points that are truly worthy and in need of your valuable brain power.

In his post, Avinash challenged his readers to provide an Excel solution since there are no OOTB (Out Of The Box) solutions for introducing constants, statistical or otherwise, into charts - Excel tries to box us into using just vertical and horizontal axes scale controls.

Well, I can’t pass up a challenge like that right?

What do you think of this?

So what’s going on here?

1. Named Ranges - Named ranges are your friend. In this case, I’ve got named ranges for each important series of data, especially my key metric - page views per visit. That way, I can insert a new row of data and my constants (Standard Deviation, Mean, Upper Control Limit, and Lower Control Limit) will update automatically. BTW, the chart uses the named ranges as well so that it will update automatically every time a new row of data is added.
2. The chart is a combination of lines and stacked bars. The stacked bars create the gray biorhythm (normal variation) area. Line charts are used for everything else.
3. For the top 5 outliers (either upper or lower) I’m dynamically adding a data label so that I know, at a glance, the specific values for them.
4. I’ve eliminated all horizontal lines other than my own constants because they are just distracting

You can download the spreadsheet and play with it if you want.

A couple of caveats:

• Named ranges won’t do the dishes for you. In other words, when you insert a new row, you’ll need to copy down the formulae from the previous row
• Excel doesn’t always do a good job of placing data labels so the outlier labels may need to be massaged after an update
• My spreadsheet only uses 1 standard deviation. While 3 might be a six-sigma best practice, three standard deviations would have put the lower control at 0.1 and common sense tells me that it shouldn’t be possible to have an average page views per visit value lower than 1.

I’ve deliberately not gone into great detail on the inner-mechanics of the spreadsheet (not that their profound or anything) because that would make for an impossibly long post - if you have a question please post it in the comments or email me directly (civy at instantcognition.com).

Update: I’ve had to (temporarily) disable Snap on my site - it was giving my site search gran mal seizures when it tried to spider the site.
I finally got my invitation to Snap - among other things they have a service called Preview Anywhere ™ which, like Ask.com offers roll-over previews of the destination site.

Try it now by rolling over this link to Snap.com.

It can be configured to preview either external links only or all links.

Further customizations allow you to disallow certain links by using a special class. Conversely, you can set it to not preview any links other than those with a different special class.

There is a wordpress plugin for it, once you’ve got your invite.

I have noticed that it takes some time to get image previews for some of the more obscure links on my blog, but I imagine that will improve with time as they grow out their image database.

I wonder if I can figure out a way to track any searches initiated from the rollover? Something to think about…

Personally, I like this functionality, but let me know what you think about it on this site (or others, TechCrunch is using it) by leaving a comment…

Tech Crunch is reporting a rumor that the founders of iRows have signed with Google and iRows will be shut down. (source is here - in hebrew)

If true, it’s a big bummer. iRows along with Edit Grid are my favorite online spreadsheet tools with the best breadth of tools. Certainly, they are currently a lot better than Google Spreadsheets, which still has no graphing capabilities, unless you count the repeat function hack.
There’s no word from the guys at iRows
Hopefully it is all smoke, but if true, I’ll miss iRows - it was my favorite

Edit: It’s True, read the announcement at the irows blog.

Or, boy I am I oblivious.

Eric Peterson lobbed this my way a week ago and I just noticed it a few days ago (I’ve been hard at work on a response).

His basic question, if I may restate it, is “What do I think about using a ‘tachometer‘ to display KPI data?”

The short answer is, I love to do this - when it’s practical.

If you work in Excel, it is often not practical because the level of initial work and maintenence needed to operate a custom chart element like this violates the efficiency rule (remember, that in order for reports to be truly effective, they need to be easily repeatable so that they can be delivered efficiently and on time). In other words, I’m lazy and it is, generally speaking, too much work for not enough return.

That being said, I’ve spent the past couple of days approximating the dashboard that Eric refers to (via Dashboard Spy and courtesy of Subaru) in Excel, to see if it could be done - with the proper wherewithal.

Here’s a screen grab of the finished product:

Ok, so it can be done.

Here’s a list of resources you’ll need to pull it off:

• Andy Pope’s Gauge Work Around
• John Peltier’s Speedometer Work Around
• Apps Pro X/Y Chart Labeler
• Excel Camera Tool

Scared yet?

Ok, here’s my file for the above picture, you’re welcome to try it out (no commercial use, please), but I make no warranty as to the accuracy or stability of it.

Long story short, custom dashboard elements like the above are cool, sexy and can effectively communicate important information such as KPIs, but hopefully you have a better platform than Excel to create them in (this is where something like Xcelsius becomes helpful).