A real time analytics solution lets you see who is currently visiting your website.   You get granular session-level detail (IP addresses, technographic information, geolocation, and sometimes even a username).  They differ from tools like Webtrends, AT Internet and Google Analytics in that they’re not well equipped to deal with trending and goal tracking.

If you run a website, we strongly suggest that you install a real time analytics solution.

Here’s why:

Monitor campaign vitriol/praise spread

Real time tools let you immediately identify where you’re being talked about by giving you up-to-the-second referral reports.  When a piece of your brand reaches escape velocity, understanding who is a part of the escape can be very valuable.

When our article to TechCrunch50 finalists first appeared on the Internet, it started getting featured heavily on news.ycombinator.com.  Without a real-time analytics tool, I never would have thought to check this particular social news aggregator.  But with real-time dashboard in hand, we were easily able to navigate through different sites and blogs, commenting in a timely manner when relevant.  Note that we could also have used a social media listening platform, but there is one key difference:

A social media listening platform (SMLP) looks at social computing sites for a particular keyword and rolls it up to your dashboard when one is found.  A real-time analytics tool looks at your own website and tells you where inbound links are coming from.  In other words, an SMLP will show you where people are talking about you (but not necessarily visiting you), whereas a real-time analytics platform will show you who is visiting you (but not necessarily talking about you).  Complimentary technologies, not mutually exclusive.

In times of community backlash (see this list for examples), real-time tools are indispensable in helping to mitigate social vitriol, by being able to identify and target communities that are talking about your brand.

Track influencers

With referrers in hand, you can drill down a little bit deeper to find individuals that are talking about you.  This can help you tame viral spread by timing when certain press releases or notifications go out.

In our case, we emailed influencers and let them break the news first (ie – Jason Calacanis, Sean Ellis, Dave McClure, Hiten Shah, Eric Ries and a few others).  Once they had picked up the post, we advised TechCrunch that we’d written something that may be of interest to them.  We used a combination of prospective search on twitter with our real-time analytics dashboard to make sure that we had a handle on who had already covered us, and not.  Though the blog post speaks for itself, its credibility was strengthened by having leading entrepreneurs give a headnod in our direction, which ultimately led to our TechCrunch coverage.

Be creepy and spy on your visitors; solicit feedback

An unrelated, creepy, but nonetheless applicable case is using a real-time analytics tools’ ability to inject itself in a user session.  I used Woopra’s “Spy + Chat” functionality for this example:

Though very intrusive, it can be used as a time intensive, but rich voice-of-the-customer tool.

Examples of vendors in the space: GetClicky, Woopra, VisiStat and Site Meter.   Note that GetClicky has given us a free “Pro” account and that we hold a trial VisiStat account, but no company sponsored (or even suggested that we write) this post.  As always, the opinions are ours, and ours alone.

Any other reasons why real time is useful?