

Google Flips Switch on Real Time Analytics - campeaux
http://campeaux.com/2011/03/google-analytics-real-time/

======
destraynor
Of course your analytics figures will keep going up. They were never frozen,
you could always see "The very latest data that Google has processed".

The key word here is "processed".

Depending on your site, and GA, there will always be some delay. i.e. if I
visit your site now, My visit gets recorded with GA. GA processes this as
quick as it can. Once it has processed it, (And then updated all its
corresponding data sets, everything from browsers, to goal completions etc),
then you'll see it.

The thing with "Real Time" is that whilst every analytics app out there claims
to have it, the ones most likely to have it are the ones with least customers.
There is some delay inherent in an analytics tool that processes data.
Otherwise it's just a tail of your server log.

If you want to play and measure how real time things are, set up a Profile for
your site that includes only visits from your IP. Or set up a new page on your
site with a URL only you know about. That'll let you see how quick it is.
(Hint: It's pretty fast when you take into account the scale of the challenge)

I wrote this run through of analytics tools, which you may have seen
[http://www.contrast.ie/blog/the-future-of-analytics-
products...](http://www.contrast.ie/blog/the-future-of-analytics-products/)

Hope that helps.

Des

~~~
relix
If there's a huge amount of pageviews, the delay is even longer than 24 hours
in GA. For one of my sites, the numbers keep going up until more than 24 hours
after that day ended. This is annoying because the interface does show the day
as being completely processed (i.e. it includes the day by default when you
open up the reports).

------
matthiaswh
Current day's data has been available for me across 5 different user accounts
and dozens of clients for at least a year. You just have to select today to
see it.

It sometimes lags by about an hour.

~~~
campeaux
In the past I have been able to select the current day... but the reporting
for the day always remained at zero. Only until the following day were stats
from the previous day available.

------
campeaux
Can anyone else confirm this? I'm monitoring my Analytics account right now
and I keep seeing the figures for today's visitors go up (with page refresh).

