Realtime Reports in Google Analytics

There is no doubt that Google Analytics is one of the best tools to use, regardless of the size of your business. It provides a wide range of reports and custom metrics so you can monitor pretty much everything that goes on on your website.

In this article, I am going to mainly focus on real-time reports and how to analyze them and use them for successfully monitoring your business. While writing this article I want to make sure that even people with no experience with the GA (Google Analytics) interface can easily understand how to use it and implement it in their business strategy.

What are Realtime reports?

As you can guess by the name these reports allow you to view metrics and monitor activity in real-time, as it happens. For a visitor to appear in the real-time reports section they have to have triggered an event or pageview in the last 5 minutes. While in all other standard reports the session window is 30 minutes. When working with the GA interface you can find these reports here:

Once you click on "Realtime" the interface will give you the option to choose from the different reports the section provides.

Now let's dive into each of these reports and what insights they give us.

Overview Report

This report shows you the big picture of what is happening on your site right now. It provides insight into how many users are currently active on your site, a list of the top active pages, top sources of referral traffic, top social traffic sources, the top locations that users are visiting from, and more. It also shows how many users are using Mobile vs Desktop devices to view your site.

Locations Report

This particular report goes into further details about the location from which users are accessing your site. From this report, we can gather real-time information about:

• The Active Users on Site broken down by country
• Also a visual map with the active users on site.

If we bring our attention to the table "Country" we can see the report is broken down into specific countries. If we click on a country we can drill deeper and see from which cities in that country our users are.

As a business, this report will be incredibly useful when it comes down to tracking a real-time marketing campaign. If let's say a campaign is specifically targeted for a certain geographical area with this report you can monitor its performance, Or you can use this report to generally understand from where users are accessing your site, which can give you insights into possible future markets to explore.

Traffic Sources

As you probably guessed from the name, this report shows you exactly where on the web your real-time users are accessing your site. If you look at the table at the bottom you can choose from two different options:

• Active Users- when you choose this option you can see the number of users broken down by source and medium
• Pageviews (Last 30 min)- when you choose this option you can see the number of pageviews made in the last 30 minutes, again broken down by source and medium

Before we discuss the importance of this report for your business, let's look at the dimensions and what they signify.

Medium

Medium signifies how users are getting to your site. It could be through:

• Organic search (if you have a good SEO strategy)
• Paid search, also visible on the report as cpc (cost-per-click). This is the traffic you purchase via pay-per-click ads.
• Email (the name of a custom medium you have created)
• Web referral (presented in the report as "referral"). This type of traffic occurs when a website has put up a link on its page pointing to your site.
• Direct traffic (presented in the report as "none"). This traffic occurs when a user inputs the URL address of your site directly in the search bar.

Source

The source signifies the origin of the traffic, put in simple words the search engine or domain a visitor uses to access your website. It could be through:

• Google (presented in the report as "google").

Consequently, if a visitor uses another search engine, for example, Yahoo it would show "yahoo".

• Referring Site (for example "Facebook.com)
• Direct

When users access the site directly by typing the URL or visitors that have bookmarked your site.

• "Name of your newsletter".

When a business sends out newsletters they want to track and monitor how much traffic their email marketing efforts are bringing in. Let's say you send a newsletter about a major discount to which you have added the necessary tracking parameters for GA. In the source column, the traffic from this newsletter will look something like this "major_disvount_newletter" (depending on the parameters you have previously defined).

What can this report show me?

This report brings insight into the different types of traffic your site receives. It can help you monitor how your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC activities are performing. It can also be useful if your site is featured in multiple press releases and you want to evaluate which of them brings more traffic.

Content Report

There are different names for this report depending on whether you are using it for analyzing website traffic (Content Report) or traffic for a mobile app (Screens Report).

This report shows you which specific pages of your site your users are currently active on. It also shows the active users broken down by device type (mobile, desktop, and tablet). Here we also have the two options mention earlier, Active users and Pageviews (Last 30 min). Now let's take a look at the dimensions.

• Page (Displays the page URL address)
• Page Title (Displays the name of the specific page)
• Active Users/Pageviews

Depending on the option you choose you will either see the number and percentage of active users on each page or the number and percentage of pageviews in the last 30 minutes.

How to use this report?

Through this report, you can achieve a better understanding of how your content is performing. You can analyze which pages are underperforming and try to improve them. This report is especially useful for bloggers, as it shows content performance in real-time.

Events Report

What are events?

Events are user interactions with the content on your site. Every time a user clicks on something or downloads a resource or plays a video that is considered an event. An event has the following components:

• Category

This is the name you choose as a way to group objects that you want to analyze. For example "Videos" will group all of the videos on your site.

• Action

It is used to name the type of event/interaction you want to measure for a particular object. Continuing with the example of Videos, the action could be "Play" which would indicate every time someone plays a video on your site it would send a signal to Google Analytics.

• Label (optional, but recommended)

This component is optional, but it is recommended to use it because it provides additional information about the specific event. In our example, the label can be used to define each video on the site.

• Value

Similar to the Label component, this one is also optional and is used depending on your business's needs. This component is an integer and is used to assign a numerical value

Understanding the report

The report, similarly to the Content Report, shows the events broken down by device type. The table below the device type provides two categories to choose from:

• Active Users

Here you can see the top 20 event categories in real-time, sorted by the number and percentage of users who have interacted with that event.

• Events (Last 30 min)

Here you can see the total number and percentage of events (by event category and event action) which occurred during the last 30 minutes.

What can I learn from this report?

This report is particularly useful if you have used the Google Events feature to create custom events for specific interactions on your site (downloads, clicks, video plays, ad clicks, and others). You can use this data to monitor the top events occurring on your site in real-time. You can also track how many users are downloading your resources. Overall a really useful report to gain insight into user interactions with your site.

Conversions Report

The Conversions report tracks the real-time completion of any Goals that you have set up in Google Analytics (This will be covered in another article). Goals track the completion of any activity that contributes to the success of your business. Examples of goals are filling a form, sign up for an email list, completing a purchase, and so on.

Goals can vary depending on the business objectives and there is no one size fits all. Every goal should have a unique name that you decide, GA allows you to set up 20 goals per View. As with the previous reports here we also have a breakdown by device type, and we have two categories:

• Active Users

This category shows the goals completed by the current active users in real-time broken down by number and percentage.

• Goal Hits (Last 30 min)

Goal Hits displays the number and percentage of completed conversions for the last 30 minutes.

How does this information help me?

Tracking when users complete goals can help you gain a better understanding at how your overall marketing efforts are performing. You can also think of goals as KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) which can help you stay in the know of the growth of your business.

Conclusion

Overall the Realtime reports are extremely effective to monitor activity on your site in an accurate time frame. Realtime reports can also be used for debugging and troubleshooting purposes as there is no need for waiting for data (all other reports need 24 hours for the data to be displayed). Popularly a lot of businesses also use it as a testing tool.Realtime reports are an imperative source of information when it comes to monitor campaigns in real-time. In conclusion I would recommend using these reports to their full extend as the insights they will give you are numerous.