While I agree with the basic premise that Real-time analytics are rarely helpful, here are a couple places where they could be very useful:
* Conferences - Being able to see live user analytics on a conference site, since it is ephemeral, would be great.
* Pop-up Sites - Again, the short nature of the site means seeing a blocking action or a broken link early is tremendously valuable.
Basically there are a couple circumstances where real-time analytics might make sense, but they're generally short duration engagements. Getting analytics info for a site which is no longer being hammered is useless unless it's a long term project.
What action will the conference take based on any immediate information or do you mean the information will go on the site?
Broken links etc. is probably in the operational category although a validator is a better solution for that issue. Logging errors and maybe tracking accesses to ensure every page is being reached can be done by realtime operational stats and doesn't contradict this article.
So think of conferences where there's a site up for one day.
If one wants users to clickthru to a particular page, but they're all going elsewhere, that's something that's only actionable on the day of the event (as changing it 12 or 24 hours later does one little good).
I see your point about not contradicting the article, but I think there are instances where evaluating the performance of a website in real time (for time-sensitive events) could have a real impact.
I don't think we're disagreeing so much as talking about the same point from different angles.
While I agree with the basic premise that Real-time analytics are rarely helpful, here are a couple places where they could be very useful:
* Conferences - Being able to see live user analytics on a conference site, since it is ephemeral, would be great.
* Pop-up Sites - Again, the short nature of the site means seeing a blocking action or a broken link early is tremendously valuable.
Basically there are a couple circumstances where real-time analytics might make sense, but they're generally short duration engagements. Getting analytics info for a site which is no longer being hammered is useless unless it's a long term project.