Google analytics has been one of the best tools available to track your website with loads of data like visitor details, pageviews, Bounce rate, Search engine traffic, direct traffic, referral traffic and much more.
One of the drawbacks of Google Analytics till now have been the inability to provide real time data on whats happening on your site at any particular instant. Till now, most bloggers were using Statcounter and few similar services to grab real time data.
Google has now come up with this new feature of tracking real-time stats for your website which tells you whats happening on your site at this moment. They announced it on their Analytics blog about this new feature.
[quote]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.[/quote]
This real time data will give you details like number of visitors at the moment, the source from where they are coming, the keywords of the search engines who are refering the visitors to your pages, location and much more. All these data will be available in real time for you to analyze what is going on your site. It will also help you find out the immediate impact of social media whenever a new blog post gets published and you tweet about it or share it on some other social network like Facebook. With Real-Time, you can see the immediate impact to your site traffic.
This new feature is available with new Google Analytics only and is being rolled out to everyone slowly. 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. 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.