Most companies have some sort of strategy when it comes to gathering and analyzing data, but real-time data isn’t always the most popular metric. Looking at clicks or conversions over a period of time is a great way to improve your landing pages, and your SEO optimization efforts, find different industry trends, and of course much more, but real-time data also has quite a bit to offer. If you were looking for something new to focus on this year, understanding how real-time data can work for you is a great place to start. 

Top Ways to Use Real-Time Data to Help Your Marketing Strategy

Real-time data is the data that will tell you what is happening to your business online right at that very moment. It is also great to increase your SaaS revenue. In other words, it offers metrics about updates as they occur. This generally means that real-time data changes quickly, and you won’t be looking at the data to make large generalizations or analysis. When you look at real-time data, you’re getting information fast and you’re getting a smaller sample size, so it will be used in pretty specific ways. Understanding how to find this data and use it effectively is quickly becoming a low-hanging fruit to help you stay on top of your competition. 

Below are a few things that real-time data can offer and how you can use that information to your advantage: 

• It helps you make sure there are no technical errors.

This is probably the best and most popular way that companies use or should use real-time data. If you just launched a contest, new website design, any type of interactive content, etc., real-time data is going to help you know that everything is working correctly and there are no technical errors. Without this data, there is a chance that you would launch something and then find out weeks later that all of the data you thought it was gathering wasn’t actually working. 

For example, let’s say I created an online poll to see what my audience thought about a particular subject. Not only would this be a great way to create an engagement opportunity, but it would also be a great way to gather data to help me improve my contest strategy and get ideas that I know are relevant. If I looked at my real-time analytics and realized that not one person was participating (especially if my audience is usually pretty active), I could go back and check to make sure there wasn’t a bug preventing the poll from working. In other cases there may be something that just wasn’t integrated correctly, so the sooner you can fix this problem the better. 

• You gain insight into what your customers do first. 

This again applies mainly to apps or games, but it could be relevant in other situations depending on your business. If you have a restaurant or a hotel business, you better have a QR code to make it simple. Put a menus, price list, even your reservation process.

If you were to launch a new feature on your mobile app or even add a new page to a contest you’re running, you may be interested to know if people are taking to your new feature right away. You might find through your real-time analytics that it takes users much longer to use that feature than you had anticipated. If your goal was to add a feature for people to use first, real-time analytics will help you know if your feature was successful in terms of that goal. 

In short, this helps you personalize the customer experience. According to an article by Instasize, “To succeed as a business, even in the digital age, start-ups, entrepreneurs and business owners need to return to the core of doing business: Satisfying customer needs with valuable products and providing a great customer experience.”

Today, you’re more likely to be recognized by a bot that has access to real-time data from your online behavior. And while the bot may not greet you, it certainly will ensure that the homepage, special offers, recommendations and, in some cases, even the color scheme reflect what it has learned about you over numerous sessions.

Of course keep in mind that real-time data isn’t going to tell you if that feature was better overall. For example, if you added a “add a video” button to your app, real-time data is going to let you know if that’s the first thing people do. However, it isn’t going to tell you if eventually people use that feature and then end up staying on your app longer. For this kind of data, you’ll need different metrics. 

For e-commerce businesses, digital shelf analytics tools complement these reports by providing detailed, real-time insights into product performance and availability across the sales channels.

• It works well for quick A/B testing and content decisions.

Sometimes you might want to test things as quickly as possible. In some cases, a company wants to test a few different features of a website or a mobile app just to make sure they have the best features in place to run an actual month-long A/B test (which obviously won’t use real-time data). The downside as you may have figured out is that this is particularly useful for larger companies that can get a lot of data in just a few minutes. For some companies, this is all it really takes to make a decision about certain aspects of a website. 

For these same reasons, being able to offer the most relevant content to users is more possible if you’re monitoring real-time data. Check out this article for examples of how Amazon and The New York Times take full advantage. For example, “if you’re planning to post a new article, you can use real-time data to publish your piece at a time when there is a large number of active viewers on-site. This will boost its chances of being seen and shared and give your article maximum exposure.”

• Monitor the immediate effects on traffic from a blog post or social network post. 

Real-time data works incredibly well when it comes to social media because both happen instantaneously. For example, if you just posted something that you think might be slightly controversial or if you posted a mistake, seeing how people react immediately might help you decide how you should react (should you remove the post, respond to those commenting, change the wording, etc.).

It’s particularly interesting if you can grow your blog traffic and see if something you posted on social media affects your website in any way. 

• Keep your customers by offering faster customer service.

This is a benefit mainly because customers are now aware that real-time data exists. If a site has been down for too long or a bug hasn’t been fixed fast enough, your audience will wonder why. The very popular “Live Chat” features on many websites are a way to talk in real-time to customers. Using real-time data can help you feel confident that you can get back to customers quickly and even anticipate why they might be chatting with you in the first place.

According to the Statista Research Report, almost “2.77 billion users were using the over-the-top messaging apps on a regular basis to communicate. This figure has been expected to move over by 3 billion users in 2022. When it comes to messaging services, it has accumulated over 2 billion monthly users.” With that said, more and more call centers are actually integrating real-time data into their processes, so to keep up with customer service for larger businesses, understanding real-time data is slowly becoming crucial. 

Where to Find Real-Time Data

You can find real-time data reports in your Google Analytics. Simply sign in and then select Real-Time on the left-hand side of the page. You can run reports for a real-time overview, locations, traffic sources, video content, events, and conversions. A sample report is shown below:

If you’re interested in real-time analytics, I also highly recommend checking out this article from online marketing expert Danny Brown to learn more about real-time marketing (specifically real-time marketing as opposed to data-driven marketing). Finding the data is one thing, but being able to use it effectively is quite another.

The Takeaway

As you can see, real-time data is the most helpful for large businesses that can earn a lot of traffic and activity in a short amount of time. In addition, a good majority of the ways to use real-time data occurs when you’re creating a game or running a contest, but you can also see that it can be used for some of the same reasons that you use your other analytics—A/B testing, content decisions, customer actions, any bugs that may occur the skew your data, etc.—just in a quicker fashion. 

In the end, real-time analytics will likely only become more important, mainly for monitoring as opposed to analysis. According to an innovation trends article, “As real-time marketing is a great way to connect with your audience in a more personal way. So, in a way, it’s like conversing and engaging with each other in person. Your audience gets to ask you questions and they can see and hear your response in real-time without any edits or retake.” Let this be your year to master this new report. Good luck!