How To: Access Realtime Website Analytics

Did you know that Google Analytics provides free realtime website statistics? Well, they do — and they are very cool. What’s even better is that the feature is baked right into their Google Analytics service. The realtime dashboard provides a quick overview of what is occurring on your site at that moment in time from how many people are on your site, what pages they are on, how they got to your site (e.g. referral, search, etc), to their location.

Realtime analytics are an excellent tool to monitor your content and see what content is performing best, as well as, to see what is driving traffic to that new piece of content you just posted. And who are we kidding, it’s also just really cool.

How do you access these realtime analytics? It’s easy. We have outlined where to find them below.

If you aren’t already using Google Analytics, you will need to sign up and setup Google Analytics on your website. Once you have setup Google Analytics on your website, from the Google Analytics account home, select your website and let it bring you to the standard reporting page.

After you are brought to your Standard Reporting page in Google Analytics, click on the Home tab in the navigation bar.

On the Home page in Google Analytics, at the top left hand side, you will see a section called Real-Time. The Real-Time section is split up into four different sub sections: Overview, Location, Traffic Source, and Content.

Each sub section provides a more in depth look at the current activity that is occurring on your site at that moment. If you click the Overview section, you will be brought to the page (as shown in the screenshot below), which will tell you how many visitors are currently on your site, what sites referred them, what searches brought them to your site, what pages they are on, and their location. Cool, right?

I definitely recommend checking out realtime analytics and using it to help you build content. It’s an invaluable resource to help determine which content is performing and which isn’t, as well as, what traffic sources are working to bring traffic to your site.