Real Time Reporting - What and Why

What is Real-time reporting?

Real-time reporting provides you a view into what is happening at that very moment. In the context of Web Analytics, real-time reporting gives you a glimpse into what't happening on your website at . 

It provides you view into on how many visitors are on your site. Which campaigns, sites, search engines, social media sites etc. they are coming from, which pages they are looking at, what actions they are taking on on etc. 

How Real-time reporting can help

Though most of your insights are going to come from the not so real-time data. Real-time reporting can help in several scenarios. Below are some use cases for real-time reports:

• Campaign Launch - When you launch a new campaign e.g. paid search, email newsletter, TV ad etc. you want to see how people are reacting to those campaigns then real time makes sense but only for initial diagnosis. Wait for complete data to make any changes.
• New Promotion - When you add new promotions on your site and want to see how visitors are reacting to those promotions, so that you can tweak/ experiment new version of those promotions in real time, then yes you should look at real time data.
• New story/content - When you add new stories, links etc. and want to see if anybody is clicking on them so that you can make some changes based on instant feedback. I can see the usefulness of this feature for news and media sites.
• Site Changes - When you launch a new version of the site and want to see if new pages are being recorded in Google Analytics and if you users are interacting as expected then real time reports can help.
• Tracking Changes - When you roll out new tracking changes and want to see if those changes are working or not. For example, you just enabled Event Tracking via Google Tag Manager and want to see if the events are capturing the right data or not. In this case you will check the real time Events report in Google Analytics. I expect you to check the changes on a development and QA environment before rolling out.
• New Features - When you launch a new feature on your site, launched a video, deployed a new game and would like to know if your visitors are using it or not, real time reports can help.

Keep in mind that even if you are ready to make changes in real time, you might not have statistically significant results based on few data points that you get in real time reports. 

What do you use the real time reports for?

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