What Google already showed mid-September during the Google Analytics Partners Summit in the US, is now being rolled out to all users: Google Analytics Real-Time. This gives you an up-to-date overview of the traffic on your site at that moment. In this article you can read more about this new feature within Google Analytics.
What is Google Analytics Real Time?
You will see the number of visitors that are currently active on your site and it will be indicated per minute and second how many there are. These reports will be updated continuously and always show data from a few seconds ago at most. You will have insight into:
visits by traffic source
which pages are visited
where visitors come from based on geographic location with Google Earth visualization
whether they are new or returning visitors
keywords that visitors used to reach the site via a search engine.
Only the total is reported, segments and filters do not work in these reports. You can find them in the top menu under the tab 'dashboard' (soon to be called 'Home'). Make sure you are using the new version of Google Analytics. This feature will be rolled out to all Analytics users in a phased approach, so everyone will probably have it available within 2 weeks.
Not all reports are real-time now
Unfortunately, only the Google Analytics Real-Time reports will contain up-to-date data. Due to the many possibilities and functionalities within the standard Google Analytics reports, it is currently not possible for Google to show all finland phone number list reports in real-time. Google states that this requires major adjustments, which are not a priority for them at the moment. The data in the other reports will therefore remain available with an acceptable delay.
Examples of what you can use such a report for:
Social media:
You can see the effect of your social media activities immediately. Now that this article has been placed on Frankwatching, I can see immediately whether visitors come to my site with Frankwatching as the referring site. The same applies to a message on Twitter. If you place a link there, you can see immediately whether your tweet has an effect on the number of visits at that moment.
Checking campaigns:
Another possibility of the Real-Time reports is that you can check whether the campaigns have been provided with the correct tags and are therefore being properly maintained, before the campaign is launched. In this way, you can see within a few seconds whether the measurements of the campaign expressions are coming through correctly, so that you know for sure that you can adjust this. You can also use this method to immediately intercept and adjust links to, for example, 404 pages. It is often the case that errors are only discovered when the campaigns are already active. The advantage now is that they appear immediately. With offline campaigns, you can use this report to see whether your TV or radio commercial is generating direct traffic at that moment. However, you can also see this later in the standard report, when you look at visitors per hour.
There are undoubtedly more customizable uses for these real-time reports. I'd love to see them in the comments!