Realtime web analytics

Google Analytics

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.

  1. 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!