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You just got on the front-page of digg, reddit, slashdot, or someone linked to your post and you want to know now instead of 4 hours ahead, because you want to

by inerte 18y ago

You just got on the front-page of digg, reddit, slashdot, or someone linked to your post and you want to know now instead of 4 hours ahead, because you want to update your post, stablish a conversation, activate static page cache, whatever. Or someone posts on a forum a link to your site telling how the release date of certain game is wrong, writing "bunch of lazy editors on site X" and you want to correct and post on the forum that you did. Saying that Analytics is not for these kind of situations on a "feature request" thread is a little harsh, isnt? :) And the parent post did say similar services do provide this information...

mkuhn 18y ago
You are right, I could have phrased my original reply more politely. I understand why you you would find it a useful feature because of the situations you describe, I would probably use other means and tools to detect your later case. I clearly see the usefulness of near real-time data in the first case. To clarify, I worked a lot on Web Analytics at a Swiss Web Agency when I did an Internship there and I mostly focused on established sites there. They most definitely wouldn't be covered on digg or slashdot. We used Web Analytics to understand the inner workings of the Websites, to understand the longterm development of traffic sources etc. and we tried to identify trends which helped to make fact based decisions when it came to developing the Sites. Therefore I couldn't directly see a use for real-time data. I would much more prefer a finer granularity in the data those tools provide and to segment in more defined pieces but that both is an area where Google Analytics is catching up fast. If there is one request I could make for a feature in Google Analytics it would be to not have to provide Google with the data but to get a Version that I could run on my computer (Urchin is hopelessly outdated, or at least was when I last checked).
jaxn 18y ago
We have notifications for this kind of scenario built into statzen.com. We will be launching in a week or two.
JustAGeek 18y ago
That's exactly what I had in mind. Very important for the site I run as a side project. :)

by inerte 18y ago

mkuhn 18y ago

You are right, I could have phrased my original reply more politely. I understand why you you would find it a useful feature because of the situations you describe, I would probably use other means and tools to detect your later case. I clearly see the usefulness of near real-time data in the first case. To clarify, I worked a lot on Web Analytics at a Swiss Web Agency when I did an Internship there and I mostly focused on established sites there. They most definitely wouldn't be covered on digg or slashdot. We used Web Analytics to understand the inner workings of the Websites, to understand the longterm development of traffic sources etc. and we tried to identify trends which helped to make fact based decisions when it came to developing the Sites. Therefore I couldn't directly see a use for real-time data. I would much more prefer a finer granularity in the data those tools provide and to segment in more defined pieces but that both is an area where Google Analytics is catching up fast. If there is one request I could make for a feature in Google Analytics it would be to not have to provide Google with the data but to get a Version that I could run on my computer (Urchin is hopelessly outdated, or at least was when I last checked).

jaxn 18y ago

We have notifications for this kind of scenario built into statzen.com. We will be launching in a week or two.

JustAGeek 18y ago

That's exactly what I had in mind. Very important for the site I run as a side project. :)