By now I’m betting that most people know that if you run Google Analytics you can look at your websites and see if anyone is on there that moment and what they’re looking at. If you didn’t know it, well, you do now. If you did, I’m betting that 90% of you haven’t gone to take a look, and that 90% of you that haven’t gone to take a look aren’t even sure how to do it. I’m taking care of that for you right now.
The first thing you do is to log into your Google Analytics program. Then you decide which website you track is the one you want to look at. If you only have the one then you’re good to go; I’m tracking more than 20 so I have to click on the website, and once it opens I click on the link next to the word “default”.
Once you have your main window open and you’re looking at the stuff you’re used to seeing you go up and click on the word “Home”. Once you’ve done that you then click on “real time (beta)”. That opens up something that looks like the image below:
What you’re seeing here is that when I went to look at whether or not someone was on this blog at the time I was looking at it, I saw 2 people were there. At the top you’ll see that it tracks how long someone is on the site at the present time, and if there were any bars on the right side at the top it would mean they just got there and had been there less than 60 seconds. On the left side at the top is minutes; the small bars tells you how many minutes a person has been on a particular article, while the big bars tells you how long someone’s been on your site. I have to admit that looking at this it’s kind of freaky that someone’s been on the site for that long, but then I don’t always close the windows of blogs or websites I visit when I’m done looking at them.
What you can’t see in this picture is that below here it will tell you the keywords someone used to end up on your site, if they came through a search engine, and then where in the world the person’s accessing your site from. Man, I never knew there were that many cities in the world I’d never heard of, let alone can’t pronounce.
When you look at your menu (where “real time” is) on the left you can check out location, traffic sources and content, which closely mirror what you see on the main real time page, but will give you a bit more if you have more than one or two people on the site at a time. I’ve been checking in on this here and there for about a week, just getting used to seeing it. It’s late night here on the East Coast of the U.S. as I’m writing this, so only seeing 2 people on this late at night makes sense; one of the people was in some city in Asia, but I can’t tell you where (I don’t think it’s Carl, but I wouldn’t be surprised). During one day I did an experiment where I tweeted a link to an article just to see what would happen and I had 6 people on at one time; that was kind of cool.
Just something else you can do with Google Analytics that I should I’d share; give it a shot some day.
