Google Analytics – Find Out What’s Happening As It Happens!

Google Analytics

Many website owners will be familiar with Google Analytics, Google’s own web analytics solution which generates detailed statistics about visitors to your website.  Google Analytics gives rich insights into website traffic and marketing effectiveness.

On the 29th September, John Jersin of Google announced big changes to Google Analytics:

“Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens.

Google Analytics goes Real-Time

Google’s extremely popular suite of measurement tools, Google Analytics, has had a number of revamps over the past few months, most notably with the introduction of real-time statistics and figures. This free service offered by Google currently takes 24 hours to report performance measures. Google Analytics has improved upon this with Real-Time, a tool which reports visitor statistics as it happen, instantly indentifying how many active users are on a website at any given time.

Quantify the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Campaigns

The much awaited, Real-time tool will shed some insight into social media tracking. The reports will be able to measure the immediate impact of tweets by the increase of hits to its website.... in real time! For example, a mention of a new blog posting on Twitter can lead to a flurry of online activity. Real-Time can help identify which tweets during a day are directly connected to an increase of website traffic.  If a business tweets about a new blog posting on its website, this should be evident by a surge of hits or visits to the blog page in the following hours. This not only measures the success of social media campaigns, but also provides insights on how to improve and engage better with followers.

Online marketing campaigns are fast and adaptive. Real-Time offers instant results for testing, so you can ensure tracking and measurement settings are correct before launching a campaign. It’s important to get this right before you start driving visitors to your page. Also test, tweak and adapt Google Analytics configurations as your campaign evolves.

Google isn’t the first company to offer such data. Real-time tools start-ups such as Chartbeat , Woopra, Getclicky and Mixpanel provide data in real-time. But unlike some of those, Google’s will be free.

It is likely to be the first of a number of changes for Google Analytics. Google Analytics Premium is another hot topic of the moment and something Google announced soon after Real-Time. The Premium service offers extra processing power, expansive data, advanced analysis tools and 24/7 dedicated support. There is an annual fee for users in the UK, US & Canada and is the first paid for solution by Google Analytics. The free version of Google Analytics will continue to exist alongside the Premium version.

How to get Real-Time?

Real -time reports are only available to a number of users in the newest version of Google Analytics. So now is the time to download the ‘New Version’. The link is available in the top right of Google Analytics dashboard.

The report feature will be available to all users in the upcoming weeks. If you can’t wait, there is an opportunity to sign up for early access by visiting https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/

For more information on our web design, web development and online marketing strategies email info@thewebbureau.com