Well I have to say I've been blown away today by a very slick new function in GA. Real-time (beta) gives you live visitor data for your website. Essentially It gives you live unique visitor volumes, page views, popular pages, top referrers, keywords and geolocation, oh and device breakdown. ITS BRILLIANT! It gives you the last 30 minutes of activity and leaves you wanting the data gap filled between Real-time and your standard reports with their 24 hr lag! It's also very addictive. I've just been watching activity on our main site for the last couple of hours. It's held firm with circa 4.5k visitors at any one moment only for Eastenders to come on telly and instantly see the figures drop to around 500, mainly in the South East : )
Real-time has actually been around since autumn 2011, but available only to the chosen few. I've overlooked it's existence purely because like many I've hated the new version of GA, or the interface at least and have continually flicked back to the old version where this feature is not available. Have to say I will be revising my view of the new version given this little gem of a feature. To get to the report click on the 'home' tab in GA (new) and it's the top link on the left hand nav. Works super fast in Chrome but slower in other browsers. Enjoy!
