New Visitor Tracking Feature for Google Analytics
Recently Google added a new feature to their ever popular Google Analytics service. If you have a website or blog, then you are probably already familiar with this service and are using it to track your visitor stats and other pertinent information. Currently in Beta, the new feature allows you to view your sites’ visitor is real-time. That’s right! You can see how many people are actually on your site at that particular time and any metrics or reports are also in real time. There are currently three metrics that you can get reports on: 1) Geographic location 2) Search queries and referrals and 3) Top Pages.
Since it’s in beta you have to submit a request for the feature to be added to your Google Analytics account. This a very easy process and in my case it only took one day for it to be activated. You can submit your request by following the following link:
Normally, you have to wait several hours for your reports to be updated. This can make it hard to measure certain things. For instance, wouldn’t it be great if you could write a Facebook post or Twitter tweet and then go to your Analytics reports and see how much your traffic increases because of those posts? Well now you can. Like I said, it took about a day for the feature to be activated. It is now on the sidebar menu on my Dashboard. Now, some of you will find yourself on the “Standard Reporting” tab after logging in. This is usually the default view. In this case you will simply need to click on the “Home” tab and you will see Real-Time (beta) on the left-hand sidebar menu.
The geographic location metric is pretty cool. As visitors come to your site you can see exactly where they are coming from. There is a map at the bottom of the report and you can see visitor marked with an orange circle. If you hover over this circle, a popup will show you the exact city and state.
The search queries and referrals is very useful. You can see what keywords drove them to your site as well as how they were referred to your site.
The top pages will show you the number of active visitors on each page. This is great information as it lets you know what the top articles are that drive traffic to your site. There are also real time graphs that show how many page views you are getting per minute and per second. You can also see if the visitors that are on your site are new or returning. Very cool!
I’m sure there will be some more functions added to this in the future and personally I am looking forward to seeing it. Just sitting and watching this is totally awesome!
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