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Google Analytics might indeed be the old man in the room, but it's free. Real time analytics do matter when things get viral, but that kind of service comes at a cost. AFAIK there is no free product (as in online service) that provides such functionality with no price tag.

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ObserverApp.com is free, and it has real time push notifications of every single visitor (try it, open observer in one tab and your site in another - it will increment in a matter of seconds).

The only problem is that nearly every second ajax link in the admin times out. That's been broken for a long time.

It is indeed free, and when you bother to set up the conversion goals and link to Adsense then it's as good as many paid solutions in many situations. The people ready to dismiss Google Analytics are the ones who haven't been shown how to get the most from it.

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