Yes, you can change the date range to include the current day, however it won't show the correct amount of traffic.
Officially they say that data won't appear until after 24 hours [1], but generally some of it will, but usually not all.
If you know the Analytics patterns of a site reasonably well (as I do my company's sites) then you can often look at the day's traffic and estimate how it's doing, but never expect it to be the final number.
(In some cases, I've actually seen traffic for the day go down after twenty four hours, once Analytics has finished working it out. I'm not sure why..)
Hmm, I have never noticed that big of a discrepancy. It seems fairly accurate for my sites. Even when my web app got 8000 hits in a few hours I was able to see them in near realtime. In my experience if the count is off, it can't be off by much.
I moniter a few sites that between them hit 20+million page views a month (~30k/hour), and can say from personal experience that, for any real idea of a day's stats from Google Analytics, you really do need to wait 24 hours.
Officially they say that data won't appear until after 24 hours [1], but generally some of it will, but usually not all.
If you know the Analytics patterns of a site reasonably well (as I do my company's sites) then you can often look at the day's traffic and estimate how it's doing, but never expect it to be the final number.
(In some cases, I've actually seen traffic for the day go down after twenty four hours, once Analytics has finished working it out. I'm not sure why..)
[1] http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-...