Real time analytics? Or why the big guys may be about to have their lunch handed to them.

Back in November at a Web Analytics Wednesday, we met Karl Wirth of Apptegic.

He told us that he had a company that was developing a new analytics tool from the ground up.The conversation went something like this.
 

Robert: 'So you're going head-to-head with Google, Adobe, IBM? That doesn't seem hugely smart. Here, let's get another gin and tonic - you're going to need it.'


Karl: 'Yes, but this is real-time analytics'


Robert: 'Erm, cool. So I can get my data immediately instead of waiting like, half an hour? Awesome. So what am I supposed to do with real-time data? My clients don't care. Make that a double please, bar-keep.'

But it turns out that there is something pretty exciting going on in the apparently mature world of web analytics. Here's some insight into what it is.

Exhibit One. 
Google Analytics leads with new real-time analytics capability. On September 29th, Google launched 'a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens'. This is a pretty big change in direction for the market leader in the space. As of last year, Google Analytics owned about 44% of all analytics, in terms of sites using GA mainly by dint of their impact in SME, while Omniture dominates the corporate web analytics space. This will probably change with GA's paid premium version though.

Right Now, Google Analytics

But that's not the point of this article. The sea-change is not about premium or standard, paid or free. It's about REAL-TIME. Based on the responses from users to Google's launch of Real-Time, the web analytics community is pretty excited too!

Exhibit Two.
WebTrends acquires Reinvigorate.

According to Reinvigorate, the main features of their tool are:

 'Real-time, Active Tracking. See site activity as it happens on your live auto-updating dashboard. Gone are the days of waiting hours or even days for your stats!

The Hottest Heatmaps. Not getting the clicks you want? Evaluate your interfaces with the ‘hottest’ heatmaps in the business and say goodbye to dead spots for good.

Know Your Visitors with NameTags. We know it's kinda creepy, but NameTags let you identify your registered users and have visibility into their habits and site usage.'

To be completely frank, these are pretty similar claims to many of the other Real-Time Analysis Tools (RTATs?) out there. The point is not that Reinvigorate is any more or less cool than any of the many, many competitors out there. The point is that there are many, many of them and that both GA and WebTrends are entering the space. This is a trend.


Exhibit Three.
There are probably thirty to forty players in the space out there but here's a very quick review of the RTATs that seem to be generating the most buzz.

• Clicky - Focuses purely on real-time analysis with an emphasis on maintenance and service up-time. 

• Woopra - Focus on customer behavior and segmentation

• Mixpanel -Engagement metrics focus

• Chartbeat - Tools segmented by 'Publisher', 'Everyone' and 'Etailer'

• Foxmetrics - Web, SEO and Social monitoring.

• Visistat - Deeper analytics with campaign tracking

• Piwik The interesting thing about Piwik is that it's open source. As a result, the community has been super-involved in modifying and championing this tool.

• Truviso - OEM and white label tools

• Seevolution - Very usable-looking heatmaps and also nifty traffic source tools

So what's going on here?


The Benefits of Real-Time Analytics
There are some pretty clear and immediate operational benefits about implementing real-time analytics. Any analyst who has had to wait an hour or two to see if code changes have propagated and are working correctly knows that being able to check immediately is a huge benefit. You definitely need to check this stuff before a ton of traffic is driven to your site and being able to check in real-time is huge.

Another benefit, according to Google is in the tracking of social impact.

'[...] to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet. With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic.'

So true. Tweets and social posts have such an immediate impact that being able to track that impact is an important counterpoint to great creative and copy.


Real-time Analytics as a Proxy for Web Evolution
Here's what we think is really happening though.

The way people are using the 'web' is going through (yet another) revolution. Much has been written about the move from desktop to mobile web. This is absolutely borne out by the campaign results we're seeing with our clients. In one current campaign, 80% of traffic came from mobile device users who were using the 'casual' version of a site. This casualness is absolutely reflective of some major trends in web use.

These are the trends we're looking at in detail:

1. Mobile web use in general. Users are moving away from large multiple-step web sites in favor of casual content consumption - an article, a tweet, a social post from a friend.
2. Specificity. You don't go to the Gilt website on your iPad, you use the Gilt app. You use the Facebook app, the Words for Friends app, etc. etc. Casual and specific.
3. Hyper-growth of casual entertainment. This includes all of the explosion of casual gaming apps. If you are reading this on a screen (vs. having your secretary print out all of your Internets), you have probably used one of Zynga's games.
4. Quick, dirty and just plain weird commerce. The continuing growth of eBay and the many competitors, along with very specific alternative marketplaces such as Microsoft Points have created an ecommerce environment that nobody could have predicted in the early days of Amazon. And forget about all the orc armor for sale out there!

While the immediate operational benefits noted above are cool, the move towards Real-Time is important because of the move towards Real-Time web. While it used to be perfectly acceptable to run big weekly reports on big deep-experience website, many bleeding-edge uses of the web are much more limited and immediate.

Here are some cases where Real-Time keeps it real.

• You're an e-tailer where pricing changes can make or break you, an online travel agent for example. If demand for a specific flight or destination suddenly spikes, you need to respond in real-time by raising prices in line with demand.
• You're an online media outlet, pricing ad space based on demographics and site (or app? or a casual game?) usership. Being able to apply variable pricing based on these factors could really make your day.
• Anything to do with mobile. User experience with mobile is so rapid that anything other than real-time reactive analytics just doesn't make sense.
• 'Traditional' analytics data verification. You thought that an 80% discrepancy between the number of click-throughs from media and reported traffic in your web analytics tool was the norm. Using real-time allows you to do some real time comparisons and understand where data reporting break-downs are happening.

One more interesting thing...
Whereas most innovations in digital data-driven marketing seem to come from the mass market, the impetus in this case seems to have come from B2B.


Marketing automation companies have pioneered the use of real-time analytics; when you speak to a sales rep whose company uses Eloqua, they probably already know, in real-time, whether you opened the prospecting email they sent you, which pages you viewed on their website and even which social connections you share.

And of course, competitor Marketo just raised $50 million in funding.

 

As Karl put it, 'If you can understand customer behavior in real-time then you can respond to them in real-time.' Maybe he really is onto something...

Read about the dissenting view on RTA from a different Karl.