Google Analytics Introduces Real-time Stats

One of the tools that competitors of Google Analytics boasted about in their pitch to users was real-time tracking of site visitors. If you are a webmaster and know a bit or two about analytics, you’d agree that most of the Google Analytics competitors have offered real-time site stats for quite sometime. Well, things are going to change now because Google Analytics will soon have that feature for its users too.

The new real-time feature of Google Analytics does what it says – helping you see what’s going on in your site at this very moment. It’s a part of the new version of analytics so you need to first click the New Version link at the top of your analytics dashboard.

The screenshot shows an overview of what to expect in this new feature. There’s a big Right Now button that shows visitors currently on your site, both new and returning. There’s also the top referrals and top active pages to help you understand where the traffic is aggregated on the site.

An interesting thing about this new feature is that it integrates with the Campaign tracking feature of Google Analytics. That means if you have just started a Twitter or Facebook campaign and have the links tagged appropriately, the real-time tool will show you how good your campaign is going and if the links are bringing any traffic at all.

Overall, if you ask me, I was excited when I came to know about this new addition. For a long time I have missed this feature in my favorite analytics tool and now that it is here finally, I might just ditch WordPress Stats in favor of the former to track real-time statistics of my site.

The feature is being rolled out and will take sometime before it is there for everyone. You’ll see it under the Dashboards tab in the new version.

However, if you hate to wait, you could sign up for an early access using this form. Again, it only works in the new version so you need to enable that first.