See your site visitors real-time in Google Earth

I’ve talked about Woopra on here before and how unbelievably great it is as an analytics suite. I’ve also mentioned that watching Woopra is like TV for me. I often have the Woopra Dashboard running on one of my monitors while I work on the other. It’s great seeing who is visiting my sites, how, when, why and where they’re going.

Well, Woopra posted a little thing on their site the other day about how the Woopra Dashboard application can be used to show you, in real time, who is visiting your site… on Google Earth!

I think it has a little ways to go yet but it’s a really nice application of the analytics tool and has some excellent possibilities.

Woopra is free, there’s a plugin that you download for you WordPress blog (or whatever platform you use) and plug in the code from your Woopra account.

Essentially, with this new little extra, you have the Woopra Dashboard running and add a network connection into Google Earth that draws information from the Woopra Desktop application.

When running correctly (I did have to tweak my settings a little) labeled Pushpins show up on your Google Earth Map as visitors arrive on your site and disappear as your visitors leave.

There is a certain amount of accuracy to the visitor location too (all dependant on the user IP address and ISP of course).

This is the kind of thing that, if I had a projector and a dedicated machine, I’d have it running and showing up on a wall all day long.

As I said though, there is room for improvement (IMHO), There’s no way you can have the location zoom running otherwise Google Earth tries to go crazy with even just a few visitors.
If you get a visitor from the US and one from Europe Google Earth tries to show as many as is can… thus dumping you in the middle of the Atlantic.
The data is only good as long as the visitor is on the site. There has been talk on Woopra Forums about bringing historical data from Woopra into Google Earth, which would be very, very nice.
Different colored pushpins for different sites would be nice too.

It’s a great start and hopefully Google and Woopra can work together on such an invaluable mashup. I’m sure that site analytical data like this would be priceless to Google and full implementation in Google Earth would me ideal for the folks at Woopra.

Well worth trying!

Find out how here