Building the Realtime User Experience

Chapter 9. Measuring User Engagement: Analytics on the Realtime Web

As a publisher on the Web or a website creator, there is nothing better than writing a new post or launching a new feature and then watching the traffic come rolling in. The problem is that the standard web analytics suites leave users waiting several hours, at best, before reporting on the traffic. Google Analytics provides a tremendous amount of depth and analytical capability, but the data that it collects from a website is not available immediately or even after a short delay. It could be hours before the data from a given website turns up on Google Analytics. The legacy analytics products allow you to see aggregate counts of hits, visitors, page views, and other statistics over a 24-hour period. However, they do very little to give a website creator a picture of what is happening on the site at any given moment.

If a website is interacting with users in realtime, providing constant updates and prompting for responses from the users on any number of different platforms, the analytics package had better be able to keep up. This chapter looks at a couple of new analytics packages that allow for monitoring your web traffic in realtime, and then we’re going to dive in and create a small analytics application that can be deeply integrated with your site.

Realtime Analytics Services

Noticing the gap in time between the actual page view and the ability to analyze that traffic, several startups have launched paid services ...