Sunday, 2 Octorber 2011
Last week Google announced a new feature for its free web analytics product that lets you see your analytics in real time. Prior to adding this feature, you could check your latest analytics, but they was typically a lag in reporting time.
But as John Jersin from the Google Analytics team wrote in a blog post, you need to be constantly watching your website for issues and changes and 24 snapshots no longer cut it.
Up until now Google Analytics was good at helping you discover what happened, but it wasn't very useful in terms of what's happening right now. That's why this new real-time capability is so important.
This enables you to test new pages and products and get immediate results. It also provides a way to measure the impact of social media such as Twitter and Facebook on your traffic as it happens.
If you want to access this new real-time functionality, you have to turn on the latest version of Google Analytics by clicking the New Version link at the top of the page. If you don't see the Real Time tab, Google will be adding it to your account over the next several weeks as it rolls it out to everyone.
