Why Real Time Analytics? How to Use Real Time Analytics Tools to Upgrade Your Business
At the time of writing, as business owners, you rely progressively more on data to influence your business decisions on a day-to-day basis.
And why not? Let’s use it to our advantage. And now, with rapid advances in tools to analyse real-time data, the results we can glean are even more valuable.
Through a mixture of pioneering advances in technology and more robust data, many businesses are currently in a stage of digital transformation.
The data coming in – from many different sources – is being used to modernize procedures, products and approaches.
As this type of transformation ramps up, many businesses are beginning to understand that such data must be utilised correctly, as opposed to merely being collected and hoarded. Raw data is worthless until it can be analysed and processed, at which stage you receive your valuable analytics.
Ok. So What is Real Time Analytics?
Erm. Real Time Analytics are: Analytics that Happen in Real Time!
Focusing on the happenings right now with your online offerings, you can track activities with ease.
What are Real Time Analytics used for?
Real Time Analytics can be used for a wealth of different research methods. Some of them include:
- Evolving trends and topics
- Ability to make rapid decisions
- Analyse website overall health
How does Real Time Analytics work?
Working in the background to facilitate Real Time Analytics are:
- Processing in Memory (PIM) chips that incorporate microprocessors to memory chips.
- In-memory analytics that delve instantly and directly into the RAM data, without having to wait for processing to the hard drive.
- In-database analytics allow databases to do the hard work.
- Massively Parallel Programming (MPP) that manages processing tasks through individual computing operating systems.
- Data warehouse machines – complex methods dealing with multiple amounts of information at once.
All of these operating systems work on one premise: reducing latency. There no longer needs to be a huge void in time where we are waiting for our data to download, we can have it immediately.
What are the Benefits of Real Time Analytics?
Fast Business Decisions
Such immediate retrieval of your online data activities allow you to make fast business decisions. And the quicker you can make these judgements, the further ahead you stay from your competition.
Rapid Reactions
Unexpected fluctuations can occur at any given moment. These can include problems with equipment, machinery, and changes in the market. Using Real-Time Analytics ensures you can respond rapidly in the moment, avoiding any loss to revenue, danger or otherwise.
Effective Managing of Risk
The ability to retrieve this data quicker than ever before, means less risks are made when it comes to making those fast judgement calls. Contingency arrangements are made with ease.
Decreased Downtime
Having the predictive capability to expect particular wants and requirements of your potential customers is like gold dust. You are free then to create unique content, backed by data, to know what they want to see, and when they want to see it.
Real-Time Testing
Real Time Analytics permit you to assess and improve all your processes, including your website, your apps, your programmes structures. When data is investigated and presented in real-time, you can take less significant, assessed risks to attain greater returns.
User Behaviour
Real Time Analytics encourages elevation above your competitors in your industry. This is because you can anticipate how and why (and when) your users make (or don’t make) purchase choices. With that understanding, you are better equipped to make rapid, efficient modifications to promote high-value actions, which could be greater engagement time on your website, or increased spend per user.
Money Saved
Money within your business can be saved by using Real Time Analytics, this is due to the nature of your data being readily available to access by permitted team members. There are no delays in retrieval of important data to share. This gives your business a much more streamlined process and procedure.
What are the Challenges of Real Time Analytics?
What Real Time Actually Means
Sometimes, people can have differing viewpoints in terms of what is actually real-time.
From the perspective of analytics, some consider real time is receiving immediate insights, whereas other people are content to hang on for a few minutes whilst the data is collated and analysed.
Dissimilar versions result in conflicting requirements. A vague meaning means doubt about possible user cases, and which business responsibilities can be fixed.
Internal Processes
Implementing real-time analytics involves key actions as collecting requirements, designing the solution's architecture, deciding on the appropriate technology, and fixing hardware and software problems. Due to the nature of these technical tasks, businesses sometimes skip over the question of how they should handle their internal processes.
The reason you’re implementing Real Time Analytics in the first place is because you weren’t happy with how your current internal processes were being carried out. Maybe equipment repair time was too long and too costly?
With real-time analytics, your needs for the maintenance team's procedure will certainly be different. Quicker solutions will be expected, as well as precautionary upkeep based on the data collected. To get the most value from the analytics solution, you should modify current upkeep processes, key performance indicators, and job types.
Your business can reap the benefits of real-time analytics if you view it as a great start to improving your internal processes.
Employees
If you are used to conventional business intelligence assisting your business’s processes, applying real-time analytics is a massive leap. However, you should not let this change become too distracting or cumbersome.
Don’t fear this upgrade to your processes and procedures, it’s a welcome change (for the better!) Encourage your staff members to be responsive to the new opportunities this data analysis will bring upon the business. Make them aware that new information will be readily available, and will assist them properly in their job roles and tasks.
To avoid interruption, top management should give the explanations for the move to real-time analytics, plainly clarify the chances it brings, and motivate them to succeed with this new way of working. Potentially there could be barriers to technology, so training can be arranged for your staff members to feel assured.
Even if you think that all alterations are for the better, ensure that your members of staff appreciate and share your understanding about the background and advantages of the new processes, and are willing to work with it positively.
Challenges Takeaway
When you execute real-time analytics, you will inevitably come across some stumbling blocks.
Just handle them head-on and use some of the hints in this article to help you overcome them, and improve your business with the implementation of Real Time Analytics.
Industries who already make use of Real Time Analytics
Financial
Credit-Scoring in Real Time
Immediate processing of credit scoring enable financial businesses to approve or extend credit for their customers.
Financial Trades
Real-time big data analytics is being applied to help decision-making in financial trading. Institutions use financial databases, satellite weather stations and social media to instantly be notified of these important purchasing decisions. Risk mitigation and analysis are key indicators for real-time data analysis used by financial trade businesses.
Retail
Focus On Campaigns
Companies can utilise use real-time analytics to deliver campaigns and motivations to customers in their shop, thereby increasing revenue.
The analysis of shoppers’ spending patterns and behaviour can foresee product or service suggestions, and now we are seeing the trends of being able to buy those household essentials before you’ve even run out of them.
Other possible uses for real-time analytics in the retail segment are:
- Making changes to costs depending on the conditions of the market
- Pushing a particular related product or service
- Creating inherently personalised deals
All of this sums up a brand new level of complexity that’s new to most shoppers. Lots of shoppers are uncomfortable with the intrusion of their spending habits and patterns being analysed.
Mainstream Advertising
Advertisers can ascertain how successful their promotions are in real-time, down to the minute. The most forward-thinking businesses already use analytics to focus their efforts on developing demographics, and adjusting their marketing campaigns accordingly.
According to recent findings, 46% of out-of-home advertisement impressions produce online search queries. These promotions push user engagement to new labels and exciting creations. Monitoring such data, as well as inbound phone calls, interactions and referrals is a simple technique that any business can start to make use of with real-time analytics.
Healthcare
Healthcare Services
Smartwatches incorporate the use of Real Time data already, for example, saving lives monitoring individuals’ heart rate in real time.
Emergency and Humanitarian Essential Services
Real-time analytical engines can be connected to Drones, responding to information such as traffic, weather, and geospatial data to make more educated choices in order to react to emergency events.
Real Time Analytics with Google Analytics
Google Analytics
Probably the best-known, and most universally-used free analytics tool, Google Analytics delivers a thorough, in-depth choice of analytical features, both for standard and mobile-optimised websites.
Google Analytics enables your business to monitor your advertising return on investment, as well as track your social networking platforms and applications in real-time.
Top Google Analytics Features
- Campaign success measuring tools
- Advanced site and app reporting and segmentation
- Mobile app reporting
- Google tag manager
- Cross-device data
- Conversion Tracking
- Custom Dashboards
- Product integrations
- Acquisition reporting
- Audience reporting
- Benchmarking reports
- Performance reporting
- Alerts and intelligence
- Real Time Data
- Custom Reporting
- Advanced Segmentation
- Flow Visualization
- Social Reporting
- Mobile Device Tracking
- Video Performance Measurement
- Multi-Channel Reporting
- Integration with AdWords
- Data Export & Tracking API
Google Analytics – Upsides
Using the dashboard, you can quickly discover how your visitors are navigating your website, and what they are searching for. Use this data to decide on content additions to your website, and where the best place for it is.
Google Analytics’ content menu shows you in a simple format – which of your pages enjoy the lowest bounce rate, and which have the highest. Work out why your visitors are bouncing more on some pages than others, and consider if your content answers your potential customers queries and concerns.
Google Analytics – Downsides
Deploying Google Analytics leaves training mostly in your hands, so it’s a learn on the job type of situation. Which is well justified, as it’s a free service, however worth bearing in mind if you have a large number of employees who require training.
Google Analytics Price
For the standard analytics package, it’s free of charge. Hurrah
A Premium service option is available to upgrade to. This gives you more advanced data analytics, unsampled reporting, and advanced, customised funnel reporting.
Who is Google Analytics best for?
From individual entrepreneurs and start-ups to small/medium sized businesses, Google Analytics does the job very nicely, and is a great first port of call when it comes to entry level content analysis.
Other Tools to Track Real Time Analytics
Chartbeat
What does Chartbeat offer?
Chartbeat enables businesses to understand which elements of their content are keeping their audience engaged. Concentrating on analysing content now , rather than the method Google Analytics uses, which focuses on data and decisions predominantly founded on the past history of your website.
Chartbeat’s dashboard shows you your analysis in different sections, such as location, authors, and more.
Scrutinise data over all your platforms – your AMP (Accelerated Mobile) pages, articles, and native pages.
Use this dashboard to know how brand-new visitors engage in a different way to your most loyal visitors.
Top Chartbeat Features
- Quick snapshots of real-time activity
- Premium data based on your Facebook and Twitter activity
- Video dashboard
- Real-time user-friendly dashboard
- In-depth headline analysis
- In-page optimisation tools
- Multi-platform analysis
- Article search functionality
- Multi-touch conversion
- Funnel visualisation
- Custom reports
- Weekly audience perspective
- Daily reports – sent directly to your inbox
Chartbeat – Upsides
Chartbeat’s Real-Time Dashboard is super user-friendly, and makes it simple to see how your potential customers are engaging with your content at this moment in time. And that’s over different devices, channels and platforms.
This enables you as a marketeer to react and optimise your content for maximum audience engagement at peak times, which will make the most difference.
The video dashboard features allows you to easily see how many visitors are viewing each one of your videos, right now. You can also see which web pages are generating a lot of traffic, but don’t include a video, so you can take action to integrate videos on these particular pages to increase engagement even more.
Chartbeat’s sophisticated video dashboard can even inform you how much of each video is actually being viewed (to the second!), when that particular video is being abandoned, including data on ads, so you can see the effect of your ads on your visitors’ viewing patterns.
Chartbeat – Downsides
Due to the higher price point of Chartbeat, it may be better suited towards larger businesses, dealing with larger volumes of search traffic and data.
Chartbeat – The Price
Choose between three plans - Basic, Plus and Premium.
The cost varies depending on the plan you choose from $9.95/month - $149.95/month.
Here’s what you get with each plan, in order to make an informed decision:
Basic
- Audience insights + visitor frequency
- Browser overlay heatmap
- Content analytics
- Dedicated support & training
- Historical and real-time analysis
- Slack integration
- Editorial reporting
- Historical report building
- In-page analytics
- Mobile app
- Multivariate headline testing
- Multiplatform tracking
- Realtime audience attention data
- Referral sources
- Robust APIs
- Section & author tagging
- Video analytics
Plus
- Audience insights + visitor frequency
- Historical and real-time analysis
- Slack integration
- Browser overlay heatmap
- Content analytics
- Dedicated support & training
- Editorial reporting
- Historical report building
- In-page analytics
- Mobile app
- Multivariate headline testing
- Multiplatform tracking
- Realtime audience attention data
- Referral sources
- Robust APIs
- Section & author tagging
- Video analytics
Premium
- Historical and real-time analysis
- Slack integration
- Audience insights + visitor frequency
- Browser overlay heatmap
- Content analytics
- Dedicated support & training
- Editorial reporting
- Historical report building
- In-page analytics
- Mobile app
- Multivariate headline testing
- Multiplatform tracking
- Realtime audience attention data
- Referral sources
- Robust APIs
- Section & author tagging
- Video analytics
- Headline testing analysis
- Advanced in-depth queries
- Multi-site analysis
Who is Chartbeat ideally suited to?
Chartbeat is aimed at middle to large businesses with upwards of 5 million pageviews on a monthly basis, and may be better suited towards businesses aiming at ecommerce.
Clicky Description
Clicky’s ROI tool platform is used by nearly 990,000 sites globally for real-time monitoring, analysis, and responding to their website traffic. Clicky offers valuable insights to make content amendments and altering your users’ journey, and how they navigate your website.
Top Clicky Features
- Customised Dashboard
- Spy Feature Updates
- Heatmaps
- Google Search Rankings
- Meticulous Visitor Statistics
- Location Tracer
- Website Uptime Status
- Multiple File Formats
- Twitter Integration
- Video Analytics Tracking
- Action-based Alerts
- Individual User Tracking
Clicky – The Good Stuff
All of the data on Clicky is in real-time, and constantly updated.
This enables you always have an overall view of the interactions on your website in real-time, and the changing analytics.
Clicky – The Great Stuff
The Spy Feature in Clicky retrieves the data of live traffic feeds. This is a great tool. It integrates users that are currently on your website, visitors who clicked on links (and which ones), visitors who searched for something specific on your website, all in real-time. Hours of fun!
Clicky – The Bad Stuff
The video tutorials for Clicky’s services are not very thorough, and lack some information. Also, the user interface isn’t as intuitive as some of the other ROI tools on the market.
Clicky Price Plans Available
Clicky is free for a single site with under 3,000 daily page views, and pro-plans are available with access to more in-depth features.
Let’s take a look at the different plans available with Clicky:
Free Plan
- Single Site
- 3,000 daily page views
- Individual visitors and actions
- Real time data
- Basic segmentation
- Customisable dashboard
- API access
- Widgets
Pro Plan - $9.99/month
- 10 Sites
- 30,000 daily page views
- Individual visitors and actions
- Real time data
- Basic segmentation
- Customisable dashboard
- API access
- Widgets
- Sub-User accounts
- Advanced segmentation
- Engagement reports
- No ads
- Email reports
- Track outbound links
- More data history
- Spy feature
- Split testing
- Better bounce rate
Pro-Plus Plan - $14.00/month
- 10 Sites
- 30,000 daily page views
- Individual visitors and actions
- Real time data
- Basic segmentation
- Customisable dashboard
- API access
- Widgets
- Sub-User accounts
- Advanced segmentation
- Engagement reports
- No ads
- Email reports
- Track outbound links
- More data history
- Spy feature
- Split testing
- Better bounce rate
- Heatmaps
- Uptime monitoring
Pro-Platinum Plan - $19.00/month
- 30 Sites
- 100,000 daily page views
- Individual visitors and actions
- Real time data
- Basic segmentation
- Customisable dashboard
- API access
- Widgets
- Sub-User accounts
- Advanced segmentation
- Engagement reports
- No ads
- Email reports
- Track outbound links
- More data history
- Spy feature
- Split testing
- Better bounce rate
- Heatmaps
- Uptime monitoring
Custom Plan – price on application - enquire
- Up to 1,000 Sites
- Up to 20 million daily page views
- Individual visitors and actions
- Real time data
- Basic segmentation
- Customisable dashboard
- API access
- Widgets
- Sub-User accounts
- Advanced segmentation
- Engagement reports
- No ads
- Email reports
- Track outbound links
- More data history
- Spy feature
- Split testing
- Better bounce rate
- Heatmaps
- Uptime monitoring
Who is Clicky best for?
Clicky gives a large amount of value for all businesses, be it small start-ups and blogging sites to larger corporations, who could benefit from the Enterprise package available.
What does the future look like with Real Time Analytics?
The pharmaceutical industry is already making great strides in advancing technology, harnessing the power of Real Time Analytics. It is predicted that such businesses will use these processes that have been put into place to predict user behaviour, and the landscape of the pharmaceutical market as a whole.
This has the possibility to lessen costs through precise forecasts, whilst simultaneously improving sales and revenue by market optimisation.
In the past, this hidden degree of analytics was largely set aside for heavy manufacturing and government processes. However, the present generation of real-time analytics is so advanced it has a significant use in almost every single profession and industry you can think of.
From analysing market trends to monitoring potential consumer purchases and everything in between, this new arena of real-time data analytics is going to stick around.