Real Time Analytics can be measured by effectively tracking metrics and setting up KPIs. There are a variety of metrics to measure for real-time web analysis, many of which you may be tracking on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis already.
Not all data sets are valuable in real time, and it’s important to focus on tracking the ones that matter most to your business, as recording this type of information can use significant storage. To make the most of your storage, learn what key performance indicators everyone should track, expanding on this list as you come across metrics that matter to you.
1. Active Users
It’s important to know how many active users you have and what they are doing on your website or mobile app. By knowing how many active users there are, you can use peak times to run featured ads and social media posts.
2. Sessions, Pageviews, and Bounce Rate
Where your users are on your site or in your app and how long they stay is one of the best ways to understand user behavior. Session length and bounce rate are crucial indicators for successes and areas for improvement. This insight into the features and content that your users value most will help you develop and improve your service.
The bounce rate is an important metric linked closely to sessions and pageviews, helping you know which aspects of your service are underperforming. In real time, this behavioral information can help you catch an error on a page and fix it to manage your retention rate.
3. User Location
Knowing where your users are located can help you understand patterns related to your most successful content. If you can identify locations that are actively sharing your content or using your service more prominently, you can use this to increase the circle of influence and the impact of your advertising campaigns.
If you run an eCommerce site and one of your ads is doing particularly well in a specific territory, you can try to target more ads to that region, or send call to action emails to capitalize on the attention.
4. Traffic Source
With immediate data, you can react to both positive and negative changes instantly. You should always know which marketing funnel your customers are coming from. If there is a sudden spike in traffic, it will let you know a certain marketing channel or campaign is successful, allowing you to highlight or enact a call-to-action.
Alternatively, a sudden drop will alert you of a problem with one of your marketing campaigns. Instead of wasting time finding the source of the problem, you’ll be able to immediately start working on a solution. This can help you turn the problem around and get your funnel working again!
5. Errors, Crashes, and Bugs
Tracking the errors your website or mobile app in real time can help you fix a problem immediately. Crashed sessions, failed links, unresponsive gestures, and other problems with the responsiveness of your website or mobile app can not only cost you sales while the problem persists, but they harm your reputation and brand.
Fixing errors that occur regularly in a timely fashion can help you gain a competitive edge, and build a great reputation along the way. Having instant data is the best way to make the most of these opportunities.
6. Advertising Costs
A clear understanding of how much you are spending on your advertising campaigns may not always be something you need to know off-hand, but there are times when it can be valuable. If you are monitoring expenditures on Facebook ads, you’ll know how much you are able to increase the spending if a post, page, or product goes viral.
By having this information immediately available, you can capitalize on opportunities for advertising that your competitors are missing. Emphasizing the right advertising campaign at the perfect time will increase the amount of exposure or ROI you receive per dollar spent.
7. Free-to-paid Conversion: B2C/Consumer Tech
Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies sell products or services directly to consumers. From brick-and-mortar stores to online ecommerce retailers, these companies often use free memberships or trials to entice subscriptions. Business cycles in this segment tend to move fast; every interaction prospects have with the company is important.
Potential subscribers who take advantage of free trials don’t always convert. To crack the code, you can use real-time analytics to find out where users are dropping off and why. It could be that many users do want to subscribe after their free trial is over, but the activation process is complicated. Using real-time analytics, you find that users drop off when they have to switch devices to activate their membership. The faster your team can host activation on one device, the better your free-to-paid conversion rate may be.
Other tactics like lowering costs, extending the deadline, and finding user engagement moments can all be tracked and experimented with real-time analytics.
8. Conversion Rate: Ecommerce
Ecommerce companies depend on visitors making purchases on their websites and then coming back for more. The conversion rate KPI measures the percentage of visitors who end up buying something.
Real-time analytics can help ecommerce companies pinpoint exactly where the friction is in the buying experience. For instance, if users are abandoning their carts when trying to add or remove an item, use real-time analytics to fix the problem and see if it worked. It could be a matter of a few clicks. Instead of having to click specific boxes on each item to remove them, perhaps you can add a “delete all” button for more convenience. Once you add the option, you can monitor the change in real-time to see if it was effective.
Changing the buying experience to have fewer clicks, altering the design or copy of the page, changing inventory, and sending notifications are all real-time data opportunities in ecommerce.
9. Subscriber Retention: Media and Entertainment
Media and entertainment companies can use real-time analytics to find new ways to drive retention. For this segment, converting prospects into subscribers isn’t necessarily as important as finding out why subscribers stick around. Retention—the rate at which subscribers remain customers—is a huge indicator for long-term success.
One way to increase retention is tracking revenue-driving subscribers with real-time analytics. These subscribers are long-haulers, often called power users. They use every little bell and whistle your product offers and spend the most time consuming content. Real-time analytics can be used to watch what this group of users is doing.
If you can come away with a specific pattern of behavior, you may be able to incentivize those same actions for the rest of your user base. For instance, you might find that users who create a “Watch List” are more likely to remain subscribed. Using real-time analytics, you can test ways to get users to create a Watch List: notifications, bigger buttons, added descriptions. Experiments like this can tell you if your strategies are working or not.
10. Cost per Lead: B2B/SaaS
The cost per lead KPI represents how much a business has to spend to generate a prospective subscriber. Getting this cost as low as possible while still maintaining a healthy stream of leads is important for SaaS companies details a hypothetical formula, “You spend $1,000 on a pay-per-click campaign and convert 10 visitors into leads. Your cost per lead is $100. If you convert 100 visitors, your cost per lead is $10.”
According to the above formula, creating more converted leads is the way to keep costs low. This is where real-time analytics comes in. By following the behaviors, preferences, and actions of converted leads in real-time, businesses can alter the lead generation experience at a faster pace.
Take a basic landing page prospects visit to fill out a form and go deeper into the funnel. You can use real-time analytics to change things like copy length, headlines, and design to drive more form fills. The best part? Once you find a winning landing page using real-time analytics, you can take that same formula and test it in another marketing campaign.
Keep tuned to my next post releases.
Reference
Datepine (Feb 2022). KPI examples and templates. https://www.datapine.com/kpi-examples-and-templates/google-analytics