Viewing Google Analytics stats in real time

As I discussed in an earlier post, Google Analytics is a huge boon for web and app developers. Unfortunately, there’s one aspect of Google Analytics that’s always been a little frustrating: it doesn’t display real-time (or even pseudo-real time) results, stopping at the previous day’s statistics. Or so I thought.

As it turns out, there’s a clever little trick that you can use to see Google Analytics stats that are quite current. In my experience, these stats are current to within the last 30 minutes or so. The trick to real-time tracking is in the date range Google uses by default. Most people loading up Google Analytics probably see a date range something like this:

In order to see those most recent statistics, you’ll need to expand that date range to include the current date, which is excluded by default. Observe:

Click Apply, and your newly updated stats will be waiting for you. Why does Google set it up this way by default? My guess is that it helps avoid confusion that might ensue if partial-day results were mixed in with previous days. For example, today’s traffic might seem like a significant drop-off from yesterday if it’s only 9:00am. By giving users the option of viewing today’s stats without making it a default, Google has given us the best of both worlds.

Posted at Dec 31, 2009 at 10:27am | Permalink | Tags: analytics