Look at their marketing. It's for publishers. Testimonials from Al Jazeera, Fox News and Fast Company. The value in real-time analytics for them is clear -- they're micromanaging their daily page view numbers by seeing what news of the day is attracting the most eyeballs from what sources, moving those stories up on their front page and expanding them, writing more about those topics, etc.

It's depressing news has become something where the story that gets eyeballs is more important than the story that needs telling. I understand WHY it's this way due to how marketing dollars play out, but it's still depressing.

Same experience here. They're great to watch but generally quite worthless in the grand scheme of things. They have value sometimes but it's not regular, for example if we need to do emergency maintenance we can check how heavily a specific thing is being used, but beyond that...

I guess they appeal to people that are marketing.

Real time analytics are an amazing tool in e-commerce.

Incremental merchandising gains can lead the huge wins in e-commerce. Real time analytics are one way to see what people are buying and what's hot right now.

Let's put this example out there.. you have a product on your site that is now featured on a hot fashion blog. Customers are coming to your shop and clamoring to purchase it. Problem is, it is already running low on stock and once sold out, you'll miss the benefit of the blog exposure. Real time analytics allow the merchants to make quick, informed buying decisions so that the product remains in stock.

I'm very interested to see what Chartbeat does for e-commerce analytics.

we are using chartbeat. we are measuring how many visitors got into the website right after the tv advertorials on our tv shows which have the highest ratings on the days they air. yes, we cross check with google analytics. :)

it is also helping us to understand at which point we fail. chartbeat really is a great service.

I understand you get a better feeling off it, but I'd love to hear from people who have noticed something using real-time analytics they wouldn't have seen from plain old analytics.

I'm not sceptical, just curious as I think it can easily turn into a great way to waste time...

Hey Tom, it's not my testimonial, but that of a close friend. This person runs a pretty successful, non-tech, blog. He uses Clicky real-time analytics, and explained to me that he uses it in real-time to either push content (via social media) or hang on to it in order to get a steady number of monthly visitors. Example, if he gets 25,000 page views during half a day, and only "needs" 30,000 a day to be on target with his estimates/budget he won't tweet/fb, or publish a post, etc. On the other hand, if he sees mid-day numbers are down, he will push content in order to reach to the desired number. From his experience, real-time analytics is worth it and works.

I'm certain this no so much the case with non-publishers or page view driven businesses.