Some serendipity.

On the way to the local doctor yesterday for a checkup, following a couple of bouts with an eye infection, I thought, hmm, Sunday, could be a while (which indeed it turned out to be – about two hours in the waiting room and last in for the day). So I took my copy of Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics, partly because I hadn’t been doing even five minutes a day on it and thought this could be a good time to catch up.

Good move. I was able to read, without much distraction, a good slab of the book and get a better fix on how to approach the whole stats question on this and other blogs of mine. It helps that Avinash is a great communicator, live and in print, and presents neither too esoterically nor too condescendingly to my non-technical mind.

I’ve posted previously about Avinash and linked to the video recording by Simon Chen of the master’s session at BlogWorld Expo last year. Having now read much more of the book than I had previously, I commend it to anyone wanting to get a grasp of how web analytics experts work, what the tools do and what they don’t – or what you have to ask for them to do, hoping the vendor can oblige.

I came home, happily with a “going well” report from the doctor and an intention to make a fresh onslaught today on Google Analytics, which I believe to be the most useful and economical web analytics tool currently at my disposal.

Then this morning I had an email from my friend Bill Vick, just back from WordCamp Dallas, enthusing about the new free, Java-based Woopra product – still in beta – with real time analytics reporting, and gave me the link to the GeekBrief video with Cali Lewis interviewing Neal Campbell, as below.

You can read more about Woopra on John Pozadzides’ One Mans Blog, where he explains what you need to do to get an invitation to the beta. Hint: priority to his regular, registered reader – fair enough.

It does look truly impressive and I’ve sent off for a beta test invitation code.

GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

Mashable has a post on Woopra but at the time of posting they hadn’t received their beta invitation code, so I don’t feel left out – yet .

No one is saying yet whether this is better than Google Analytics. But it has reinforced my intention to keep on with Avinash’s book – or course, rather, as the full title is “Web Analytics – One Hour a Day”.