Real-Time Reports
Real-time reports are reports concerning the activities on a website that can be provided in real time, without any significant time delay.
Possible applications for real-time reports
The fast-moving Internet requires rapid reactions to certain developments. Therefore, many web analytics providers provide real-time reports. These supply data and evaluations almost immediately after the visitor action on the website concerned. Such real-time reports are often only available for a fee. In order to make these real-time reports available to everyone, Google implemented real-time reports free of charge as part of Google Analytics in 2011.
Functions of real-time reports
With real-time reports you can find out what is happening on your website currently, how many visitors it has at this instant, what they are doing, and what page they are on. Google Analytics provides six real-time reports.
- Overview: provides an overview of the various statistics, such as traffic sources, keywords, pages viewed, geographical locations
- Locations: geographical locations of the current visitors
- Traffic sources: media, from which the current visitors came to the website
- Content: pages that were viewed in the last few minutes
- Events: events carried out by visitors
- Conversions: monitoring of targets
Benefits
Real-time reports can provide useful information when it comes to evaluating the activities on a website as quickly as possible. Google Analytics real-time reports can also evaluate activities in social media services.
You can track in real time how users are responding to a particular post. If necessary, timely measures can be taken. Operators of websites that work with fast moving content, such as news articles can quickly find out which articles get a lot of attention from real-time reports. Moreover, with real-time reports, you can evaluate campaigns immediately. For example, you can find out after just a few minutes how a newsletter is being received by readers.
Relevance to search engine optimization
Real-time reports can be used wisely in the field of SEO as well. With Google Analytics you can recognize the impact of newly implemented measures and changes to your website directly. Instead of having to wait until the next day for the results of the previous day, you have immediate access to real-time reports and thus gain a competitive edge. The chosen course can be corrected immediately as needed if it does not produce the desired result.