Real time? I might ditch Google Analytics and Statcounter (using both, mainly because statcounter is near real time, you just have to know when you're linked by Slashdot or Digg!) for Yahoo if it works great. Will give it a try for sure!

Hey there..

>>Real time? - Great for Yahoo if it works.

It actually works very well, and we had a 7 second latency only - in the days of IndexTools. And the reason for only using the ‘up to the minute’ in Yahoo! marketing material, was to make sure we under promised and over delivered :-)

Cheers d.

Dennis R. Mortensen, Director of Data Insights at Yahoo! Blog: http://visualrevenue.com/blog Book: http://visualrevenue.com/blog/yahoo-analytics-book

That was the biggest selling point for me as well. Up to the minute results is huge when it comes to things like running blog promotions or campaigns.

True for me too. I like GA but the delayed results can be really frustrating.

For as often as my co-founder and I check GA for our medium-traffic site, I'm a little concerned for our productivity if we can see analytics in real-time!

That's actually a good point. I wonder if there will be a way to maybe get alerts with YA. Maybe even write a small desktop application that gives you an at a glance look at what's going on.

If that happens, GA will be sunk.

Any reason you don't use Mint (haveamint.com)?

It can easily kill your server. The last thing you want to do while having high traffic is kill your stats. You can think ahead and cache your pages, but you can't cache your self-hosted real time stats.

Not free :)

My hope is that this pushes Google to provide real-time stats too. That way I don't have to do that migration thang :)

Migration will be very fast: Google Analytics does not allow you to export your traffic data.

Good. Some of the most useful reports in Google Analytics ("Recency", "Loyalty") are also the most opaque. This could be refreshing if it makes it easier to get at stickiness and returning visitors out of the box.

Also:

Drill down on branches to follow visitor movements down to a single visit.

GA doesn't show you individual user visits. This would be stupendous, as right now we are forced to write our own middleware to capture this granularity.

If they can offer a decent API to their analytics, I'll jump on board right away. It's so frustrating that Google does not provide anything other than a web interface and manually generated exports to interface with their data. And as far as I can decipher, making that data available to your site users is against the TOS anyway. Maybe Yahoo can do better.

hi,

We do in fact have a YWA API - and a bunch of clients using it. It is not open for the public as of today, but stay tuned! :-)

it has recently been enhanced alot, because of the integration to the Y!OS developer community that we are doing..

Dennis R. Mortensen, Director of Data Insights at Yahoo!

Blog: http://visualrevenue.com/blog

Book: http://visualrevenue.com/blog/yahoo-analytics-book

Nice to see. This was predicted some time ago in the analytics world.

I've never used IndexTools but from a sophistication / power standpoint, it's been compared to OMTR's SiteCatalyst.

Combine that with real time capabilities and you have a very powerful combination.

Looks cool. Google has been top notch for me for a few years now, but this looks even better!

Though, you can be sure Google will make it near real-time and have an API soon! If/When that happens, I may just return to Google. So try to impress me Yahoo! :)

Isn't Google real time? The default calendar doesn't include today when you look at stats, but you can just change it. I don't know what the lag is exactly, but I don't think it's all that far off.

I'd be curious to see how this compares to Woopra and GetClicky -- both of these I'm a big fan of.

I have been using Woopra for real time stats, I actually liked it. Will check this out.

Why didn't they do this years ago?

they're just now getting into this? what took them so long?

Well, taking a look at how long it took the new delicious to get out, I'd say Yahoo doesn't mess around when it comes to building large scale services like this. I quickly warmed up to the new delicious, but fwiw, it's been rock solid ever since it (finally) came out.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

NICE! If only that would help our stock... :\