What can you do with real-time web analytics? At a very basic level, you can track visitors to a website and view what movements they make, where they come from and where they go in real-time. Unlike traditional analytics services who often deliver statistics between 8 and 48 hours after the fact, real-time services like GoSquared offer the data to view as it is happening.
This ability to view data in real-time has significant advantages over that of delayed historical data, after all it is difficult to react to an event that has already been and gone. Here are just some of the reasons why real-time analytics, such as those provided by GoSquared, offer a real advantage.
Monitor Referrers
Seeing where your visitors come from is just as important as the visitors themselves. The internet moves at a fast pace these days and it’s important to be a public facing and involved brand. Customers feel included and special if your brand makes a specific effort to personally go right to them, that is to say it pays to be proactive rather than reactive.
The great thing about real-time analytics is that it is geared to situations where being proactive is vital. An incoming link from a popular aggregation service could be a great win for new customers but what’s happening on the discussion thread immediately underneath the link? Within hours the fuss will be gone and that historical data will be useless but real-time stats will allow you to get stuck in with the conversation happening around your brand.
In a similar vein knowing what is happening on social media is very important. Brands with active Twitter accounts, Facebook pages and Google+ pages pick up better followers, closely targeted customers and have more of an understanding of the buzz around their company and their product. And as with referring sites the ability to jump right into the conversation is only possible with the insight of real-time data.
Highlight Top Content
It’s a popular concept across all types of website to publish what content is popular, whether that be top blog posts or top selling products it is a powerful method of attracting traffic to pages with already high engagement and conversion rates. With real-time analytics data it’s possible for this data to be completely accurate rather than the majority of current methods that take an average over time.
Real-time analytics data makes it possible to publish top page lists that are up to second accurate providing unbelievable value for fast paced websites.
Alerts
Data that is 24 hours old is unable to alert you to what is happening now. Real-time analytics enables you to constantly monitor what is happening now on your website so that even when you’re not paying attention to your web analytics you’ll be able keep an eye on the major changes in traffic level.
Notification of changes in web analytics norms go beyond just knowing when there is a sudden influx of traffic. Server admins monitoring large websites will want to know when to keep a particularly close eye on server capacity and team members who spend time dealing with social media will want to get onto the task as soon as possible. All of that is possible with alerts that are delivered straight to your phone or Inbox.
Live Chat
One of the great metaphors when talking about real-time is the idea of a an e-commerce website being able to act more like a physical retail store. When a person walks into a car show room they aren’t left wandering around without a sales assistant approaching, so why does this happen on so many shopping websites?
With real-time web analytics and live visitor tracking it doesn’t have to be a one way road anymore, it’s now possible to track the movements of a visitor around a website and using a live chat module contact them directly and begin a conversation.
Live Visitor Tracking
Real-time analytics offers the distinct advantage of being able to see what visitors are active on your site right now, where they came from and where they’re going. Being able to see what parts of the world your visitors are from, what OS and browser they’re using offers the ability to react immediately—and this is what makes real-time data so important.
Excited about Data
Whilst the above benefits of real-time highlight real world empirical examples there is another aspect where real-time analytics is shining in business. People in the marketing department, sales teams and customer service have their morale boosted by data, but it’s useless if this data isn’t relevant to what they’re doing right now.
Imagine the morale boost real-time data has when marketing sends out an email or sales begin a product promotion and the results are immediately visible.
Go Real-time with GoSquared
GoSquared is built for real-time analytics, we’re all about accurate, fast and beautifully present real-time analytics. Sign up for GoSquared for free. To See GoSquared in action take a look at our live demo.
If you have any questions be sure to drop us a line on Twitter – we’re @GoSquared, or via old fashioned email.
