Ask HN: How important are real time analytics?

[vicjicama]

Hi

I am working on a very rudimentary analytics tool for a couple of projects.

I only capture page views, unique visitors (a hash), referrals, timeOnSite, agent info, load time for each page and every hour I aggregate the result and store them on a CDN. I also have some alerts that are triggered and sent immediately.

This leads to a cost effective and simple solution... but I am totally missing the real-time statistics, so far I am ok with this, I only review the results once or twice a day or when an alert is triggered.

But I was wondering if there is something important that I am missing without the real time information? Why is the real time information useful for you? How much do you spend reviewing the real time analytics?

Thank you.

[jackgolding]

I'm the digital analytics manager for a company that does multi-billion dollars in ecommerce. The real time analytics our ops team use doesn't use any of this behavioral information.

Only place it's been asked for by an operations team is during large (1m+) email sends to ensure there isn't a spike in traffic to error pages.

[Gustomaximus]

For me real-time is useful in 3 applications;

1) Error monitoring like site down.

2) System checking, like checking analytics is working directly after setup.

3) Amusing/impressing non-tech types that they can see who is on their website at that moment when I try to explain the value of analytics.

[cardosof]

In my experience real time data is only relevant for teams that either monitor major site changes or monitor operations. I mostly work with marketing/retail and I couldn't think of, let's say, having a Black Friday event without real time stats.