I have a love/hate relationship with the real-time data in Google Analytics.
I love the immediacy: people are here right now! This person from France just arrived on the website. Here is someone else: they're from the US. That user is sticking around a while. Do they like what they see?
Also, the Realtime Overview report is great for checking an account is working at its basic level: visit your website, head over to Google Analytics, are you counted?
Sadly, my brain tells me that my love of real-time data is superficial. The reason? The numbers draw me in too close: I lose perspective.
I know one website that gets around 800 active users per day during the week. I kept a close watch on it during a 24-hour period last week. For the Active users in the last 30 minutes measure, the highest number I saw was 33, while the lowest was 14.
That exposes a problem: when I look at the Realtime Overview, am I seeing my website at its busiest moment, or its quietest moment? I just don't know.
Moreover, while it's great to see the last 30 minutes, there's a measurement gap here. What happened 44 minutes ago? Or 3 hours back? That data is hidden away until tomorrow arrives.
When I experienced a viral moment at the University of Oxford, I vividly remember watching the real-time number ebb and flow. It was a fruitless exercise: I had nothing to compare it with.
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