Wow, great to see that round-up on one page.
Question for HN - does anyone value real time analytics for anything other than a physical LCD dashboard? Personally, I guess it's nice to have, but I wouldn't pay more for it.
Question for HN - does anyone value real time analytics for anything other than a physical LCD dashboard? Personally, I guess it's nice to have, but I wouldn't pay more for it.
The usage scenario most people fall back on when I have asked them about it is a blog post or something going viral. They don't want to wait the couple hours that Google Analytics sometimes takes to update. Great, you know something is getting a lot of traction with social media or maybe gathering some links... what do you do with that?
If you don't have a plan for how to react in real time, there's no sense knowing your Analytics real time.
(The other usage case often brought up is knowing when there is an issue with your website. In my opinion, this isn't the job of an Analytics package to detect.)
Sort of like fear of flying vs. fear of driving, people like to feel in control.
Aside from that you can use it to identify problems early on - one of my users shipped a broken version of their game and figured it out very early because their level metrics weren't flowing in.
It's also useful for anything with a short lifespan where the hour(s) you wait for GA wastes xx% of an article/promotion/whatever's opportunity.
- On a popular news site or blog, if a particular entry becomes very popular, you may want to follow up on the story on the same day. - On a corporate or sales site, you may want to track big stories (traffic, particular referrers) as they happen so you can respond if necessary.