Google Analytics and Real Time Reports
Google Analytics is a tool all businesses and brands (and people) with a website should be using. It's free and it provides a wealth of information that can be useful in making business decisions and understanding your audience. Google Analytics provides real time, audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions reports. Each report breaks down into different information that is unique and important.
A super interesting aspect of Google Analytics is the Real Time report. This can come in handy if you want to measure the importance of an event (such as a Black Friday sale). You will be able to see how this is useful in a time-sensitive setting where you want to be able to know information as it is happening. It provides literal real time information about your site - how many users there are, where they came from (referral), active pages (the page the users are currently on), locations, social traffic, and more. This video gives a glimpse of this report overview and how it changes as user information changes.
As the video shows, the number of users (broken down into desktop vs mobile), their locations, top pages, and more consistently change. Furthermore, the locations report information breaks down the users' countries and the relative percentage to how many users are on the site. You can also see how many pages/screens were viewed from each city during the past 30 minutes (Google Analytics, n.d.).
Very important information lies with the traffic sources report. This is very relevant in a situation where you are hoping for a campaign, post, advertisement, etc. to go "viral" in a sense that users see it and react to it in the time period that you hope that they do.
For instance, say you are a makeup brand and you are releasing a holiday collection at 12:00 PM (EST) tomorrow. At that date and time, you can log onto Google Analytics, and see how many users are on there, and where they came from. If your launch was heavily posted about on social media, you can determine which sites were most successful at reaching people. If it was promoted on Google Ads, you can see that as well.
The content report information shows (in ranking order) which pages are being viewed and how many people are viewing them. If your important information - that you want to be seen - lies deeper than your home page, you hope that this information will reflect that.
Google Analytics Real-Time reports - Analytics Help. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1638637?hl=en.
A super interesting aspect of Google Analytics is the Real Time report. This can come in handy if you want to measure the importance of an event (such as a Black Friday sale). You will be able to see how this is useful in a time-sensitive setting where you want to be able to know information as it is happening. It provides literal real time information about your site - how many users there are, where they came from (referral), active pages (the page the users are currently on), locations, social traffic, and more. This video gives a glimpse of this report overview and how it changes as user information changes.
As the video shows, the number of users (broken down into desktop vs mobile), their locations, top pages, and more consistently change. Furthermore, the locations report information breaks down the users' countries and the relative percentage to how many users are on the site. You can also see how many pages/screens were viewed from each city during the past 30 minutes (Google Analytics, n.d.).
Google Analytics Real Time Location Report
For instance, say you are a makeup brand and you are releasing a holiday collection at 12:00 PM (EST) tomorrow. At that date and time, you can log onto Google Analytics, and see how many users are on there, and where they came from. If your launch was heavily posted about on social media, you can determine which sites were most successful at reaching people. If it was promoted on Google Ads, you can see that as well.
Google Analytics Real Time Traffic Sources Report
The content report information shows (in ranking order) which pages are being viewed and how many people are viewing them. If your important information - that you want to be seen - lies deeper than your home page, you hope that this information will reflect that.
Google Analytics Real Time Content Report
Events report information shows the real time firing of events. 
Google Analytics Real Time Events Report
Last but not least, and maybe most important is conversions report information. Here, you determine goals (i.e. completed purchases, newsletter signup, etc.) and the real time results are shown. Unfortunately for the Google Demo, none of their conversion goals have been met yet, as shown here.
Google Analytics Real Time Conversions Report
Hopefully this post has been a help in seeing the importance of Google Analytics Real Time Reports. This is just one small portion of Google Analytics, and I encourage you to check out other reports, like the Audience report, which gives audience, demographic, behavior, technology information and more. Google Analytics provides so much information, but sometimes it can be hard to understand and interpret it. Be sure to utilize Google Support to better understand the information that is provided to you.
Google Analytics Real-Time reports - Analytics Help. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1638637?hl=en.
Hi Morgan! Interesting post!
ReplyDeleteHi Morgan,
ReplyDeleteThis was very helpful in explaining the use of real time reports. I don't work in an industry where I have events or anything, so it was hard for me to wrap my head around the concept. I really like how you broke down the information and showed examples!
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHi Morgan,
ReplyDeleteYou took a lasered approach to this assignment that had an interesting perspective. Real Time reports tend to be important in a fast paced environment and being able to look at 30 minutes back on many of the reports is often critical.