Jeremy Richardson heads up Business Development atMixpanel, Inc. a real-time analytics service that helps companies understand how users behave with web applications.
For a while, a big limitation of online optimization tools was their lack of real-time reporting. Google Analytics
, the most popular analytics service out there, can easily take a full day before displaying your data. This was acceptable back when the web was static, but as websites become more and more dynamic, the rate at which we analyze and iterate based on our collected data has dramatically increased.
There are many industries where optimizing in real-time can have a large impact on overall business performance. Unfortunately, not all companies are aware of the potential value in tracking information in real-time. Let’s take a look at a few areas where real-time data processing is already making a big impact.
Content Websites
One area where we are seeing real-time analytics improve content companies is in article headlines. For most of us, an article headline is all we use to decide whether or not to read on, so having a good one is definitely important. The Huffington Post is ahead of the game here. They use analytics to run A/B split tests on their important articles – in real-time. The Huffington Post initially shows 2 headlines for the same story, after 5 minutes of testing they discard the less popular one.
Aside from A/B testing article headlines, real-time analytics can play a large role in organizing and prioritizing entire stories as they break. If publishers know the popularity of an article based on the number of reads, comments, tweets, or Facebook “Likes” in real-time, then they can make informed decisions about how to optimize their pages with the best content. As media companies continue to concentrate more of their business online, real-time data analysis will likely play a large role in shaping how key decisions are made in every aspect of the company.
Game Companies
Social gaming is a huge industry that can, and does, benefit from analyzing their data in real-time. It’s a very cut-throat business: Whenever a new strategy is successful, it’s immediately copied by everyone else. Analytics are necessary to keep an edge on the competition. Specifically, real-time analytics are important because social games often have a short lifetime, and the makers want to get as much value out of a single customer as possible. If they can’t iterate on a game for a whole day, and the average user only plays for 7 days, then that’s a large opportunity that is lost due to a lack of data.
A large gaming company that I’ve spoken with sees well over 30 million MAU’s and they analyze and make changes to their games every hour, every day. Real-time analytics gives them the ability to maximize their iteration and get the most out of each game they make. It’s a large part of why they’re so successful.
Live Streaming
In live streaming, a flash crowd is when a large group of people shows up and then disappears in a relatively short time span. Imagine how many people tuned in when Landon Donovan scored that epic goal to advance USA in the World Cup, for example. The amount of data here would have been huge if every network packet from every user was captured, and was likely too much information for most companies to capture, record and analyze in any timely and useful way. The huge amount of crowd behaviors would need to be observed in real-time.
An engineer at live streaming company Veetle told me they often need to reserve and allocate additional resources when a crowd is larger than they expect. For simple cases, like the season finale of Mad Men, there are simple allocation heuristics they use that automatically make up for a larger than expected audience. However, for extreme cases smart allocation is a difficult problem.
With something like the Donovan goal, they would have had to have a person observing the flux of people streaming the game, and manually decide what resources to properly allocate – something they would only be able to do with real-time analytics.
Instant Gratification Makes us Happier
Having data available in real-time simply makes you happier: The ability to set up and start tracking immediately gives you the peace of mind in knowing that everything is working smoothly. And, if something does end up being wrong, no time will have been wasted waiting and hoping that the data will eventually show up in a report somewhere. The joy that real-time brings to customers is evident: Analytics company Woopra flat out asked their customers why real-time mattered.
The responses Woopra received focused on the niche information that real-time data provided them. For example, one user wrote: “Just had a potential new customer on the phone, Woopra instantly shows me the 38 pages on our website they read before calling.” Another user found real-time data helped better filter the content he was producing, while for others the benefit was in identifying trends. “Real-time stats are great to understand upcoming trends. Helps to track user interest during different hours etc,” said one user in response.
[Full Disclosure: Woopra is a competitor to the author's company.]
Your Business in Real-Time
Being able to analyze your data in real-time has the potential to add a lot of value to your business, whether you run a hugely popular website like The Huffington Post or a small business. However, taking advantage of real-time analytics requires commitment – you have to be ready to act on the data as fast as you receive it. It’s possible to automate some of the work, but you usually need a human decision maker. This can be difficult to get correct but it can make your advantage even bigger once you succeed.
More Business Resources from Mashable
- How Social Media Has Prepared Us for Collaborative Business
- HOW TO: Evaluate Your Social Media Plan
- Why Your Next Business Card May Be Virtual
- HOW TO: Improve B2B Sales Productivity with Social Media
- HOW TO: Use Social Media for Lead Generation
Related Posts