Access to Real Time data

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It was announced yesterday that Google Analytics will now report data real time:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-happening-on-your-site-right-now.htm
l

It would be a great feature that the export API have access to this real time 
data.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by marksche...@yahoo.com on 30 Sep 2011 at 8:16

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if you want this to happen everyone has to visit the thread page and STAR IT 
please.

Original comment by buaziz on 25 Jun 2012 at 10:04

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So many potential apps could be built from this functionality.

Original comment by m...@jon-hadley.com on 27 Jun 2012 at 2:58

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Please add this!

Original comment by jason...@gmail.com on 1 Jul 2012 at 6:52

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There seems to be some kind of realtime API now - the new Analytics Android APP 
for Android uses it. Have found no documentation though - perhaps some IO2012 
attendees know more ..

Original comment by marcus.b...@gmail.com on 1 Jul 2012 at 9:34

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In the android app, the realtime data is using a webview, which is based upon 
this url: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/mobile/?hl=#home/ but I could 
not find other details(parameters), anyone?

Original comment by folkert....@gmail.com on 1 Jul 2012 at 8:10

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Would scraping the data for personal use until an API call is available go 
against the terms of service? (I'll take the question down if it is)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11021554/scraping-real-time-visitors-from-goo
gle-analytics

Original comment by k...@kirkouimet.com on 3 Jul 2012 at 2:40

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Please add this function!

Original comment by denis9...@gmail.com on 4 Jul 2012 at 6:05

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I want to do an extension for Google Chrome showing the number of users of my 
website on the icon (next to the option).

Original comment by denis9...@gmail.com on 4 Jul 2012 at 6:07

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This would be an amazing feature!

Original comment by vincent....@gmail.com on 5 Jul 2012 at 11:01

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Cannot WAIT until this feature is implemented... would be fantastic

Original comment by mtd...@gmail.com on 10 Jul 2012 at 2:20

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Make it happen

Original comment by ipowow...@gmail.com on 10 Jul 2012 at 2:32

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[deleted comment]

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I think if we keep making more comments, then this will surely make them do it. 
 Whos with me?

Original comment by simon.ro...@gmail.com on 10 Jul 2012 at 4:03

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> I think if we keep making more comments, then this will surely make them do 
it.  Whos with me?

Also voting (in the top / left) in this feature request.

Original comment by pabloh...@gmail.com on 11 Jul 2012 at 2:16

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Former Googler here:

Here's what will most likely happen: The user support team, probably once a 
month, will collate the votes for features across the site and rank them by 
popularity. They'll take that to a general Analytics meeting where the PMs and 
lead engineers will look it over and re-rank them based on how much work they'd 
be, whether they fit in with larger strategic goals, whether they're already on 
the roadmap for a future functional revision, and frankly whether they want to 
do it.

Other factors, like engineering pet projects, competitive threats and the like, 
often get features prioritized, and hopefully the recent Android app showing 
realtime data is a sign they're making this more accessible.

My best guess at the moment is that their primary concern is server tax. 
Realtime requires a constant data stream, and people using them on dashboards 
that are up 24/7 would end up requiring more servers for only a nominal benefit 
to Google, especially since Google would rather you use their site than just 
their service in another site's wrapper.

I dearly hope this feature does sparkle in a Google PM's or engineer's eye. 
It's the one piece of realtime data I constantly want, and the primary reason I 
check in on the site every day.

Original comment by ke...@fury.com on 11 Jul 2012 at 2:35

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@Former Googler - re server tax - you are only allowed a certain amount of 
courtesy anyway. then you are charged I suppose.

Original comment by ellulpat...@gmail.com on 11 Jul 2012 at 2:41

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So I work on the team and we're reading this with the Tech Lead right now.

Can we get some more concrete use cases.

That will help prioritize. Thanks.

Original comment by n...@google.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 5:41

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Allow third party analytics to show live data is a big one (for me).  We also 
have internal "realtime" dashboard systems that were built internally, I would 
love if we could display realtime data instead.

Original comment by eduardos...@gmail.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 5:45

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My first request would be to access the live visits/pageviews/location of 
visitors with polling or websockets?

Original comment by justin.j...@groundctrl.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 5:47

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Use case for me? Building a dashboard with data about actual number of 
visitors...at least

Original comment by lukas.sl...@gmail.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 5:50

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A common concrete use case would be analtyics on a metrics dashboard located on 
a company intranet. At my company we have a single big board of "how the site 
is doing" showing various analytics. 

At the moment, we use the data API provided by Chartbeat, which is incredibly 
similar to Google's realtime stats. If we could get API access to realtime 
data, we could dump Chartbeat and stick with Analytics solely for our 
statistics.

Original comment by matho...@gmail.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 5:50

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Track social media campaign efforts to real time Google Analytics statistics.

Original comment by sou...@gmail.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 5:53

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We also have an internal dashboard system that displays live time data on 
monitors, being able to include the "real time" web analytics for visitors 
who are online and sections they are viewing would be valuable to us.

Original comment by jasonfu...@retailpoint.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 6:02

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Same here: We have a physical display in our office that shows live web traffic 
and we'd like to use Google Analytics to power it. We have LED lamps to show 
the relative activity of different sections of our site and as we launch social 
media campaigns it builds a lot of momentum in the office to see the users come 
in to the site in realtime, or see the huge boost when one of our campaigns is 
picked up by a major outlet.

We (Electric Imp) are also working on ambient displays like bar charts made out 
of christmas tree lights and gauges powered by servos that would be driven by 
realtime analytics data.

Original comment by ke...@fury.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 6:04

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- Internal dashboard
  - Number of users on site
  - number of users on site for each country (i.e. map overlay)
- Realtime notification of a custom event (Such as New Order)

Thank you for finally looking at this issue.

Original comment by m...@ste-roberts.co.uk on 13 Jul 2012 at 6:06

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I am with the crowd here.  I have 4 different company divisions that need to 
monitor seperate websites for each division.  We've built an internal hud for 
each to sit in their main work spaces but they still have to watch chartbeat or 
google on their screens to see activity.  Moving this to the hud with ajax or 
websockets make tons of sense and honestly would save Google some traffic.  1 
hud VS 45 computes with sockets/polling seems like a no brainer.

Original comment by sha...@2020research.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 6:07

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Either a continuous socket connection or simple POST API to access the 
real-time data of a site (number of users, where they are on the site, where 
they have been, location, etc all the details on the dashboard including drill 
down ability). We could then integrate this into our CRM (customer resource 
manager) to predict upcoming sales call volumes.  (For us, website hits 
directly correlates to sales calls.)

Original comment by ncrawf...@cabdepot.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 7:05

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I manage the Web program at a large Medical Center with a site that
brings several million visitors each month.

A real-time feed of current visitor count, referring keywords, pages
being viewed, etc. would be immensely useful:

1. We would add the feed to our executive dashboard
2. It would be included on our Staff Intranet

Seeing the activity from 500-800 simultaneous users would make it much
easier for me get increased Adwords spending, targeted web marketing,
etc.
It would sell the value of our Web program much better than a static report.

Please build this - I would be happy to pay a reasonable monthly fee.

Original comment by ebenn...@gmail.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 7:28

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I would like to use it to create more dynamic content. For example could a news 
site offer all news which are currently really important with a lot of 
visitors. 

Original comment by karsten....@googlemail.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 7:32

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I have created a inboundlink detection service which queries the ga:source and 
ga:referralpath dimensions to discover new links to a site.  Sometimes it can 
be a number hours before the api reports when clicks are made on new referring 
links.  I could see the performance being improved with realtime API.

Original comment by marksche...@yahoo.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 8:18

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Use case: 

- display the terms being searched on our site in real time 
We're a public library and it's fascinating. So customers could see "what is 
being searched right now"
- similar to what others are suggesting in terms of using the data for live 
visualization in their offices, we'd do something like that in public spaces 
(includes number of users, pages they're on, search terms, locations etc.)

Original comment by dara.ren...@gmail.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 8:31

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My example is that our company would like to build a sort of hummingbird like 
dashboard wich displays all our customers websites in our hallway so that our 
clients have a real representation of what's going on on their site when the 
visit our business location, we would also like to build the same sort of view 
in our customers portal so that the site owners can see whats going hot on 
their site in realtime. This would be verry nice for some of our customers with 
more than 100.000 views a day. For more info about hummingbird witch is truly 
awesome but very hard to get working checkout http://hummingbirdstats.com/

Hope realtime API will finally become public :)

Original comment by janus.ne...@gmail.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 9:20

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We have some dynamic pages using analytics api querying about top pages in some 
sections of the site ordered by pageviews or visits. Currently this query has 1 
day of delay and granularity, I would like to be able to add something like 
top/hot pages of the last "x" hour(s) without delay.

Thank you for asking for use cases and hearing to the people.

Original comment by jne...@gmail.com on 13 Jul 2012 at 9:59

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[deleted comment]

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For a few needs listed here, statsd (https://github.com/etsy/statsd/) and 
graphite (http://graphite.wikidot.com/) can be a good solution too.

More about it 
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/

Cheers

Original comment by pabloh...@gmail.com on 14 Jul 2012 at 12:07

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We'd like to use a real time analytics API to power dot-matrix displays in our 
radio studios, so that our presenters know how their on-air discussions are 
impacting our web traffic. 

Specifically we want to show by-the-minute page views and unique visitors, and 
trends over the past X minutes. 

Original comment by gmg....@gmail.com on 16 Jul 2012 at 9:02

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The Ex-googler said that this feature would cost Google a lot of bandwidth, 
while not providing much benefit. I disagree from a competition perspective. 
People circumvent it anyway through scraping or switching to another service. 
So providing an API, even with harsh rate limits, could only make things better 
for Google Analytics and its users.

My company creates an embedded media player (http://shootitlive.com) and we use 
GA to see what sites are drawing traffic at the moment. I know a lot of other 
embed services do this as well - SoundCloud, Disquis, Coveritlive, etc. And I 
can only speak for us, but if no API opens up for GA realtime, we will have to 
find another real-time solution.

Hourly delays (the best Analytics Premium gives you) for fresh API data doesn't 
cut it so this is a market demand waiting to be supplied - be it by Google or 
someone else.

Original comment by e...@shootitlive.com on 16 Jul 2012 at 3:42

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I'm not sure how this would cost Google a lot of bandwidth - any more so than 
viewing it on their dashboard would cost. It's also not like Google is lacking 
bandwidth.

Original comment by ncrawf...@cabdepot.com on 16 Jul 2012 at 3:46

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(Former Googler here again)

First, I just wanted to mention the amazing change from 'me too' and 'that 
would be great' comments to detailed descriptions rationales and use cases that 
came about after Nick let us know that Google's considering the feature and is 
looking for more user feedback.

Second, just to clarify, I never said the feature would cost Google a lot of 
bandwidth (it woudln't. text is tiny). By 'server tax' I meant the added 
comutational power required to keep a live running tally of a site's health and 
performance as opposed to batching and collating the data periodically, whether 
it's every 5 minutes or every hour (or, as it used to be not too long ago, 
every day).

Sure, it's the same amount of power as if you had the current realtime 
dashboard open all the time, but once you offer it as an API people write 
endpoints that are live 24/7, feeding dot matrix displays and dashboards that 
go on walls or just scripts that plug in to site/server health monitors like 
Servly, watching for trouble and letting you configure your own custom realtime 
notifications. Any one of those could demand 36x the server load of someone who 
checks realtime stats 10 times a day, 4 minutes per visit.

But I'm not saying this is the case. I don't have any special insight into 
Analytics' architecture and I was only raising an educated guess amongst a 
number of other educated guesses. As I've noted in this thread several times, I 
very much hope the feature is implemented, and was only trying to elevate the 
discussion by giving folks a bit of perspective in to how these things are 
usually decided.

Original comment by ke...@fury.com on 16 Jul 2012 at 4:26

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Thanks. We cant commit to anything but this type of feedback is really helpful.

Original comment by n...@google.com on 20 Jul 2012 at 12:50

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Tracking the progress of social media campaigns, integrating data from 
analytics with data from internal systems to show spontaneous trends and 
identify possible issues.

Original comment by kev.lee....@gmail.com on 23 Jul 2012 at 3:04

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Our real time analytics services currently monitor things like calls and sales, 
providing us with a "single view" on how the business is doing. We are running 
a very "interactive" business, and things that we do may change how many people 
are calling us or are going to our website in real time.
It would be amazing to be able to integrate data coming from Analytics into our 
dashboards.

Original comment by claudio....@gmail.com on 2 Aug 2012 at 8:55

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We are looking to display "What's popular now" type content in a sidebar, 
hopefully based on calling this would-be API

Original comment by austegard on 3 Aug 2012 at 7:53

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Access to realtime stats over API would be awesome

Original comment by callum2...@googlemail.com on 23 Aug 2012 at 10:29

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Still desperately needing this, plz plz plz!! 

Original comment by bubblebo...@gmail.com on 4 Sep 2012 at 9:09

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Real time online users with status: idle, active..

Original comment by nenad.si...@poslovna.hr on 6 Sep 2012 at 6:13

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We would appreciate this feature as well as it would help us coordinate PPC 
initiatives 

Original comment by bspiegel...@gmail.com on 6 Sep 2012 at 11:47

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I would like this feature as well. As a web agency, being able to show the 
actual live user statistics from all websites we manage on a flat screen tv on 
our wall would not only be awesome , it would actually provide useful 
information in regards to how many visitors are on the websites when we perform 
updates etc, without us having to log into the different analytics accounts 
just to check the realtime number.

Original comment by adam.ger...@oddhill.se on 15 Sep 2012 at 1:46

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I would greatly appreciate this feature.

Original comment by E3pO...@gmail.com on 17 Sep 2012 at 4:32

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We would also like to integrate this information into our intranet dashboard, 
having this data available through the API would be very useful.  This would 
also allow us to store the information for historical real-time usage which 
gives a better idea of the load you need to support, and ability to match this 
with system usage for future hardware planning.

Original comment by murdo...@gmail.com on 18 Sep 2012 at 3:30