In keeping with the recent spate of developments across their range of products, Google has announced the addition of a nifty new feature within the new version of Google Analytics. Google announced in its Analytics blog yesterday the introduction of real-time data into the Analytics reports – meaning webmasters can see exactly what is happening on their website at any given time. Google said:
“Currently, Google Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens.”
This new feature promises to be a good way for webmasters to track the effectiveness of different campaigns in real time and track the impact of social media activity. It will also enable site owners to stay on top of the most popular content on their sites. For example, if a particular page or post is suddenly getting a lot of interest and page-views, this could be temporarily moved to the homepage in order to maximise this temporary rise in interest.
Similarly, if you create a new page you can keep an eye on its performance from when it went live and act on any problems you may find instantly – high bounce rates, low page view times etc… can be identified and rectified quickly before any real damage is done!
As well as this little addition to the Google Analytics toolset, Google also recently announced a new premium version of the software aimed at those who require extra processing power, advanced analysis and extra support. All of the current features of the free Analytics will remain though, so the new Premium version is really geared to the huge corporations and agenices who handle multiple accounts and could benefit from the increased data collection etc…
What do you think of these new Google Analytics updates? Will you find a use for real-time reporting? Let us know in the comments below…..
Posted by Luke Glassford
