Lots happening in the world of Google Analytics in the past few days: Realtime, Premium, Webmaster Tools integration and yet another design update coming soon.
I actually experienced an emotional response when I first saw the numbers and charts updating live. It feels very personal to see a certain number of people from different parts of the world right now on my site, giving me a little bit of their valuable time. Is my site making them feel welcome? Are they finding what they are looking for? Please, no 404 page 
Back to business. Having realtime data means you have to be able to take action in realtime.
Realtime data is really useful when you know what to look for, such as checking that a new campaign has been implemented properly. After you launch a new Adwords campaign, are the tags firing properly on the landing page? If they are not, we can quickly add tags or pause the campaign.
Another cool use is if you have implemented a new AB experiment. With Website Optimizer it currently takes quite a bit of time between the launch of the experiment and getting data. Now you can know right away if you have messed up the tagging:
Realtime is great for tactical stuff like that, but I would love to see a couple of additions:
1) Allow regex in the search box so I can monitor groups of pages.
2) Add Page Titles to the realtime Content report. Sometimes I can’t identify a page by its URL, but rather by its title, such as 404 Page not found pages.
Given the pace of development I am sure they are working on the next version already!
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I must admit, I’m a bit skeptical of the use of it. I like your A/B idea, but the main problem I have is that there is no way to download the data, you can just see it. Working for an agency means that the data is pretty useless as putting a test live will be in a long list of things to do for the day, so there is absolutely no way I’d ever have the time to just watch the numbers.
Do you think that they will introduce a download button? Otherwise I can see a lot of graduates with long Excel spreadsheets on one screen, GA on another and hours spent unproductively reporting.
I agree with you and it’s good to be skeptical! First of all, any new tool or feature should be useful and not just cool to look at. I also suggested a couple of things that would make it more useful for me. At this point I basically see the value as being tactical, ie launch a new landing page for example and see whether data is coming in. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google will iterate quickly though on the functionality. To me the key to realtime is being able to take action in realtime, and that means having automated rules and alerts. I’d like to know for example of 404 errors as quickly as possible, but as you rightly say, it makes little sense to stare at the data hoping to catch something of interest.
Hi Michael,
Hope all is well. Long time no speak!
Yahoo! Web Analytics has had real-time data (7 second day) for a long time (going back to the Index Tools. To be honest, real-time is a nice to have but not a must have.
However, I do see this changing mostly for the purpose of campaign tracking and optimization. With Promoted Tweet campaigns running on a real-time social network like Twitter and real-time bidding taking place on display ad exchanges such as Right Media Exchange, I see a need for real-time data. It will help the advertiser make campaign modifications on the fly as their campaigns move through these real-time networks.
Launch a campaign, track the effectiveness of the campaign in real-time (most likely still need several hours to generate a large enough sample size), measure the kind of audience the campaign is attracting (for example, you get demo/geo and behavioral interests in YWA), then modify campaign based on the data received.
If you’re hitting the wrong inteneded audience for example, then you can modify the campaign/ad to effectively reach the right audience.
Hi Matt,
Thanks for taking the time to comment! I know YWA has had realtime and I hope it didn’t sound like GA is unique in this regard. Realtime can be really useful for tactical stuff as mentioned in the post. Love your idea of segmenting by geo/behavioral/demo which you can do in YWA, but will likely need a pretty large traffic size.
Cheers,
Michael