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Google Analytics has been the leader of web analytics
software and services for a while already, but there was one area where they
suffered from the competition: real time statistics. It is an exceptionally
useful tool for those who participate in the Google AdSense context advertising
program, and need to measure the instant effect of the new posts, interface
changes, new program launches on their sites.
Until recently, you were not able to see how many visitors are
visiting your site at that particular moment, what pages they were visiting,
where they were coming from and so on. Yesterday, September 29, Google
announced adding new features to Analytics, including real time tracking.
Through their own words:
The web is getting
faster, 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 products
were 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, Google
Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. 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.
You’ll find the Real-Time reports only in the new version of
Google Analytics. If you’re not already using the new version, you can start by
clicking the “New Version” link in the top right of Google Analytics. Real-Time
reports are in the Dashboards tab (though they will move to the Home tab in the
updated interface next week). You will have access to Real-Time reports if you
are an Administrator on your Analytics account, or if you have access to a
profile without profile filters. Real-Time does not support profile filters.
Note that while the features were enabled for multiple users already, everybody will have eventually the access to Real-Time in coming weeks. If you can’t wait, you can sign up for early access through the following link: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/.
Note that while the features were enabled for multiple users already, everybody will have eventually the access to Real-Time in coming weeks. If you can’t wait, you can sign up for early access through the following link: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/.
Real-Time Analytics allows you to instantly track the
efficacy of social media campaigns. By tagging links that you share on Facebook
and Twitter with tags related to your marketing campaign, you can track the
exact impact of those links. If you need to know how to do that, here's
the link.
While the free real-time stats for Google Analytics remain
free for its users, this week it also introduced Google Analytics
Premium, its first paid offering for larger websites. While Google's free
offering tops out its data collection at 10 million website visitors per month,
its new paid plan offers more data collection, additional modeling tools and
service support. When Google called this service "Premium", it wasn't
kidding. The service costs $150,000 per year--far out of the reach of most
small and midsize businesses (SMB), according to Forrester analyst Joseph
Stanhope. But for the large businesses it should be an extremely robust tool.
One feature alone--downloadable unsampled reports--sounds temptingly like it
would let you download your own data about your Web properties from Google.
The 24-hour live technical support is attractive--especially to the less
tech-savvy at larger corporations who may miss out on key data with the current
Google Analytics.
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