Full-time web analyst here. Total agreement. Information is as useful as your ability to act on it--no more, no less. Real-time analytics is something that sou

Full-time web analyst here. Total agreement. Information is as useful as your ability to act on it--no more, no less. Real-time analytics is something that sounds sexy and gets a lot of headlines (and probably sales), but it's not particularly useful, especially compared to the cost to implement. Most organizations aren't capable of executing quick decisions of any significance. In fact, quite a few business models wouldn't have much to gain even if they were capable of it. My experience is that there are three types of companies, with very little overlap: 1. Companies large enough to receive statistically significant amounts of data in under an hour. 2. Companies small enough to make decisions regarding significant site updates in under an hour. 3. Companies whose name is "Google." Fact of the matter is, any change to your site more significant than changing a hex value will require time overhead to think up, spec out, test, and apply. Except in the most pathological cases of cowboy coding, it will take at least a day for minor changes. Changing, say, the page flow of your registration process will take a week to a month. You won't be re-allocating your multi-million-dollar media budget more often than once a quarter, and you have to plan it several months in advance anyways because you need to sign purchase orders. In short, you can usually wait 'til tomorrow to get your data. Really, you can. Sure, you can probably stop an A/B test at the drop of a hat, but if it took you a week to build it, you ought to let it run longer than that. I have had one client who really did benefit from real-time-ish (same-day) data. It was a large celebrity news site. They could use data from what stories were popular in the morning to decide which drivel to shovel out that afternoon. This exception nonetheless proves the rule: Of the 6 "requirements" listed in the article, only 1.5 were needed in this particular case: hard yes on accessibility, and timeliness was relaxed from 5 minutes to 30. (Note that when I say analytics, I mean tools for making business decisions. Ops teams have use for real-time data collection, but the data they need is altogether different, and they are better served by specialized tools).