Logging into Google Analytics this morning presented me with a new link on the left... REAL-TIME (BETA). I remember signing up some time ago to be notified when this was live, but forgot all about it until now.

Today's productivity quickly went down as I started looking at it! For all the websites I have access to, I can now see exactly how many people are on the website every second, which pages they are looking at, what the top pages are, top search terms, top referrers, a map of where in the world they are - everything you could do with GA before, but now it's in REAL TIME!

I suppose the question is, "does the new Google Analytics Real Time make GA more powerful, or is it just another 'bells and whistles' feature?

There is no information displayed that wouldn't be displayed 'tomorrow' anyway, so is there ever a time when you would need to know what is happening right now?

Perhaps if you were doing a live online training session, you could see that if there is no-one on your website you'd be better off just providing it as a download or not doing it at all.

You could guage the response when you launch a new blog post to see how well it is received and what effect that has on your website - not information you couldn't find out tomorrow anyway though.

Let me know how you think it could be useful by commenting below and if you don't have access to it yet, this is what it looks like:

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