A few days back I wrote a guest post regarding the Google Analytics Real-Time feature for Atish Ranjan in his personal blog – TechTricksWorld. At the time, I had requested for the feature to be enabled to my Analytics dashboard and was waiting all the while to actually see how it can help me promote my posts.
Now that it is live and kicking on my dashboard, I feel I should give it the expected credibility by atleast reviewing the feature and explain what it means in “Real Time”. So here goes:
First few days, I was just amazed at how much information Google can really provide a website owner about his traffic and the demographics about it. However I didnt get to visually see a great impact in the number of visitors for any new posts of mine as and when they were published and the feeds generated and sent all across. A little disappointed, I went back to the age old dashboard information and statistics.
Yesterday evening changed my view on the Real Time feature in GA. I posted a new article – Most Expensive Sites Ever Sold and as a routine task, I started sharing the post on all my social networks, however this time I had my analytics page open and checked if any difference it made to the real time numbers. Guess what….
I shared my post on FaceBook, Twitter, Google Bookmarks, Delicious and as soon as I stumbled it I saw there were 4 new visitors on my site. Well, that rose my interest, and I thought it might be sheer coincidence and went on with my blogging exercises of the day like reading new posts from fellow friends and giving my few cents of thoughts on the same.
But the fact still lingered at the back of my mind that somehow there were 4 new visitors immediately after I stumbled the article. Just to test it further, I went back to an older post of mine which I had not shared on StumbleUpon and stumbled it, by this time however the previous 4 had “bounced off” from my site, but again I saw the Real Time showing 5 visitors(1 of course being me), now this really put me on the edge of my seat and I knew I was onto something, so i started taking screenshots of every change in my real time data.
I started stumbling one after another all my older posts, and constantly saw an increase in the number of visitors from 5 to 8 to 12 and so on until it reached 29 visitors after I had shared almost 8 of my previous posts in StumbleUpon!!!!
I took screenprints of every change in my dashboard and you can see them all in the links below. See the final screen print that I took of the 29 visitors down below.
Inside of the Real Time dashboard, it is also possible to see which part of the world the visitors are from, and all the new visitors happened to be from either Santa Clara or Jersey City. Now that was really strange since there was a considerable increase in the number of visitors but how come only from these 2 places? I still have to figure that out, anyways, if anyone has experienced the same, do share your thoughts and we can review them together.
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Interesting analysis and make sense Praveen. The realtime stuff looks pretty cool and may help to fine tune business and bidding sites focus on right target customer location based on traffic. Since initial version and new we need to wait and watch how its going to drive us. Thanks for the post.
Mani – I am finding it very informative and have my analytics dashboard always open in a browser these days. It is nice to see people from unknown places browsing an article written by you.
Awesome, I just submitted our site to receive his feature. Thanks.
Bryce
I am sure you will love it Bryce.