Google Analytics has been the leader of web analyticssoftware and services for a while already, but there was one area where theysuffered from the competition: real time statistics. It is an exceptionallyuseful tool for those who participate in the Google AdSense context advertisingprogram, and need to measure the instant effect of the new posts, interfacechanges, new program launches on their sites.
Until recently, you were not able to see how many visitors arevisiting your site at that particular moment, what pages they were visiting,where they were coming from and so on. Yesterday, September 29, Googleannounced adding new features to Analytics, including real time tracking.
Through their own words:
The web is gettingfaster, and not just the speed of the pages, but also the speed of change.Before, it was fine to build a website and modify it only when new productswere launched. All of us avid Analytics users know that's just not good enough.We need to be constantly on the lookout for problems and opportunities.
Currently, GoogleAnalytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we're very excitedto bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google AnalyticsReal-Time: a set of new reports that show what's happening on your site as ithappens.
You'll find the Real-Time reports only in the new version ofGoogle Analytics. If you're not already using the new version, you can start byclicking the "New Version" link in the top right of Google Analytics. Real-Timereports are in the Dashboards tab (though they will move to the Home tab in theupdated interface next week). You will have access to Real-Time reports if youare an Administrator on your Analytics account, or if you have access to aprofile without profile filters. Real-Time does not support profile filters.
Note that while the features were enabled for multiple users already, everybodywill have eventually the access to Real-Time in coming weeks. If you can'twait, you can sign up for early access through the following link: http://ping.fm/Y1PUY.
Note that while the features were enabled for multiple users already, everybodywill have eventually the access to Real-Time in coming weeks. If you can'twait, you can sign up for early access through the following link: http://ping.fm/Y1PUY.
Real-Time Analytics allows you to instantly track theefficacy of social media campaigns. By tagging links that you share on Facebookand Twitter with tags related to your marketing campaign, you can track theexact impact of those links. If you need to know how to do that, here'sthe link.
While the free real-time stats for Google Analytics remainfree for its users, this week it also introduced Google AnalyticsPremium, its first paid offering for larger websites. While Google's freeoffering tops out its data collection at 10 million website visitors per month,its new paid plan offers more data collection, additional modeling tools andservice support. When Google called this service "Premium", it wasn'tkidding. The service costs $150,000 per year--far out of the reach of mostsmall and midsize businesses (SMB), according to Forrester analyst JosephStanhope. But for the large businesses it should be an extremely robust tool.One feature alone--downloadable unsampled reports--sounds temptingly like itwould let you download your own data about your Web properties from Google.The 24-hour live technical support is attractive--especially to the lesstech-savvy at larger corporations who may miss out on key data with the currentGoogle Analytics.
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