Do you need Real-Time Web Analytics?

Real-time web analytics provides you a view into what is happening on your site at that very moment. It is really interesting to see where visitors are coming from, what keywords they are searching, what pages they are viewing etc. Though most of the time that’s where it ends i.e. it is interesting but not very valuable. As many web analysts have stated time and again, the value of the analytics comes from the action you take on that data. So, unless you are going to take actions in real time you really don’t need real-time analytics. However, I can understand the temptation to use Real Time Analytics for instant gratification.

Side Bar:

Recently Google Analytics joined the bandwagon of providing Real-Time analytics. Other notable real time web analytics vendors include Chartbeat, Woopra. As of now, Google analytics only provides a very limited view of real time stats at this point, though I am assuming that it is just the beginning and Google will roll out more stats in its real time reports. 

Few cases where you might want to (or be tempted to) use Real-Time Analytics

• You launched a new campaign e.g. paid search, email newsletter, TV ad , and would like to see how people are reacting to those campaigns.
• You added new promotions on your site and want to see how visitors are reacting to those promotions, so that you can tweak those promotions in real time.
• You added new stories, links etc. and want to see if anybody is clicking on them so that you can make some changes based on instant feedback. I can see the usefulness of this feature for news and media sites.
• You made some technical changes e.g. changed tracking code and want to see if those pages are being recorded in Google Analytics. Real time reports can serve as QA tools.
• You launched a new feature on your site, launched a video, deployed a new game and would like to know if your visitors are using it or not.

Keep in mind that even if you are ready to make changes in real time, you might not have statistically significant results based on few data points that you get in real time reports. If you have nothing better to do then you can for sure kill your time with some real time view into your site traffic.

Views from Twitter

 

 

What do you think? Have you found Real time analytics to be useful? How are you using it? Please share your views.

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