Do you want to work in a business that wastes time and money on experiments that don’t work?
Do you want to miss out on valuable prospects and opportunities?
Do you want to irritate your customers with delays in spotting and solving issues?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you probably won’t be interested in real-time analytics, and this article really isn’t for you.
If, however, you want to ensure you’re as effective as possible with experiments, that your sales team are as effective as possible, and your customer service is on point, then real-time analytics will almost certainly be helpful for you and your team.
With many analytics tools, teams can wait for anything from a few hours to a few days to access the data they need to evaluate and act upon. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Why real-time analytics?
In this guide we’re going to focus primarily on real-time web analytics, but you can make use of real-time data in almost any field.
Within milliseconds of a visitor performing an action on your website, the data will be available for you to view, use, and make decisions from.
Real-time analytics is a competitive edge that your business can easily gain, it allows you and your teams to be more responsive, more informed, and more profitable. After all, it’s difficult to react to data that is historical by the time you see it.
There are many types of real-time business intelligence that are crucial to optimise your business’ performance and their usefulness will depend on the industry and size of your company. However, real-time analytics is a great place to start and can provide some of the most actionable and practical insight of all business tools.
For our customers, and for the majority of businesses, the main reasons they choose to use analytics tools is to make more money or to save more time. Real-time analytics makes a huge difference in your ability to get the most from your analytics tool and your site.
The continuous input and output of data in real-time analytics software allows an insight into your site above and beyond any other type of analytics tool.
Disclaimer: We make a real-time analytics product as part of the GoSquared platform. So, we are of course somewhat biased and believe that real-time capabilities significantly boost the growth of our customer’s businesses – otherwise we wouldn’t have built it.
Make more money
It’s fairly safe to say that making more money is a goal shared by almost every business.
Identify profitable web traffic
Most of the visitors that come to your site aren’t going to purchase your product.
There are many ways that you can improve the percentage of likely customers who visit your site, but it’s never going to be a perfect 100% accuracy.
A great feature of real-time analytics is being able to identify when there are visitors currently on your site who are likely to make a purchase. An instant feedback CRM tool can provide you with data of exactly who visits your site when they are still there giving you a unique opportunity to react.
For example; we have an alert set up for when a visitor is browsing the pricing page of our own site. This is a pretty key behavioural indicator that they are seriously considering our product and real-time analytics data allows us to capture the attention of that visitor using a proactive live-chat prompt whilst they are engaged with the site.
Convert more visitors into customers
When you know what’s going well and what’s going wrong with your site you are able to alter your customer’s and prospective customer’s experience.
Most pressing is the case of things being ‘wrong’ on your site. There is no need to have a less than effective page or feature live for any longer than it takes you to realise it’s not working. With real-time analytics, you are able to quickly address any issues that are stopping visitors from converting into customers.
Take advantage of real-time sales
With real-time analytics, you are able to sell to your customer whilst they are browsing the site.
This is not suitable for every single customer, but if you have any large enterprise clients browsing your site, and are able to identify them with your real-time analytics tools, tailoring their experience can really be worth the time.
Without real-time analytics feedback, this is impossible.
Automatically highlight popular content
Using real-time analytics feedback you are able to automate the most popular content – that second – to a priority position on your site.
This allows you to capture any curious visitors who might have come in via hearing about your company on social media and easily find the post or subject that’s causing the conversation.
Real-time analytics can especially help news websites that can instantly show the popular stories at any given moment – a task that simply otherwise wouldn’t be possible without a large staff of editors continuously updating an ordered list.
Save more time
We are yet to encounter a team who wouldn’t like a few more hours in the day.
More effective A/B testing
Knowing what actually works, and what doesn’t work, is so important for any development of your site. Instead of making a change and then having to wait around for the reports to come through, real-time analytics allows you to see, at that moment, how visitors are reacting to your new changes.
This is something that customers often talk to us about when they are switching from a delayed analytics service to a real-time service. Particularly for product and sales teams, the saved time makes a huge difference to their ability to meet and break targets.
Knowing what’s not working as soon as that happens can also prevent expensive mistakes and missed opportunities. By testing quickly and efficiently your team is on the way to finding the best solution fast – not next week, not tomorrow, but today.
Solve problems as they happen
When something breaks your teams need to know about it as soon as possible.
Our hyper-speed, no patience world makes any issues with your site breaking a big deal. But it happens to everyone. Knowing that at some point, despite best efforts, there is likely to be an issue with your site’s performance isn’t it best to put in the best alert system possible?
Real-time analytics is about responding in the moment – rather than learning about an incident to address “next time it happens”.
You’ll see a drop-off in visitors, conversions and odd patterns in your data the second an issue arises. This means your team can get in there and fix the problem at a minutes notice – saving your team time in identifying where the issues are and saving you the lost revenue.
Make quicker decisions
For all companies, speed makes a difference. Whether that’s in sales – where real-time tools allow you to approach prospective customers in context – or whether it’s in optimising for conversions and product performance.
For a single instance, waiting a day or two for your data to emerge doesn’t feel like such a big deal. But when you extrapolate that over the lifetime of your business you quickly realise how many days are wasted by slow data and slow decision making.
This is especially relevant for quickly growing companies where their legacy data and data patterns are no longer relevant a few days later. Reduce the risk of making false assumptions based on old data, and have the confidence to make fast decisions based on real-time analytics and up to date data.
Is real-time analytics right for my website?
As you’re reading this post you’re likely to be looking for ways to get more customers, save time and money, and to grow your web traffic and business. With this in mind: yes, real-time analytics is likely right for you.
Anyone with the desire to grow their business and turn more visitors into customers can get a lot of value out of a real-time analytics product. It’s especially useful for businesses that do most of their selling online, or who rely on visitor engagement metrics.
A real-time business intelligence tool can open up unlimited opportunities to perfect your customer acquisition strategy and plug the ‘leaky bucket’ of visitors who don’t convert.
Let’s chat
Have you been using real-time analytics already to benefit for your business in a way we haven’t mentioned here? We’d love to hear about it and add the suggestion to this guide.
If you want to have a more in-depth discussion about the individual use cases for your own business, please get in touch. We look forward to chatting with you!
