Real Time Analytics in Google Analytics
What is Real Time Analytics
Real time Anaytics in Google Analytics provides you a view of what is currently going on your site. Current version of Google Analytics has 3 set of reports that it shows real time data for
- Location – Location of current visitors on your site
- Traffic Sources – It shows you the list of referral and keywords for the visitors currently on our sites
- Content – List of pages that the visitors are currently viewing
How To Get This Report
All the users of Google Analytics Latest version have this report enabled. So if you are using old version of Google Analytics, just switch to the new version and you will have this report. It is under “Home” tab (see image below).
Uses of Real Time Analytics
[adsense]
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.