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An oldie but goodie from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s “Analytics Evangelist”. It’s from 2006, but he referenced it today in a Twitter message but the big idea is still very useful:

The thought being that with the fast pace of the web and everything changing all the time getting real-time data is mandatory to being able to take advantage of all that the web has to offer from its ability to cough up so much data.

This customer desire seems to be so pervasive that every little and big web analytics vendor prominently advertises how real-time their data is. Someone says I can do every five hours, the next guy says I see that and I raise you three hours and the next gal says you guys are sissies because I can give you real real-time and give you live traffic streams.

But is getting real-time data really relevant? Do you are really need it? What’s the cost of getting real-time data?

Martin’s comment:

My work is more in advocacy and blogging with an occasional foray into e-commerce system. There’s no real-time actionable decisions going to get made in real-time: I’m often lucky if my clients will sit down with the reports I put together (I’ve been getting a lot of one-line “looks great! thanks! Sent from an iPhone” responses lately!)

But it seems like this is not unlike the live-streaming switch we’re seeing take off in 2009 with Facebook and Twitter. I have found that the focus on immediacy has the tendency to draw my attention from the more important long-term work.

Typical scenario: I’ll make a video or will write something. It will go up to Youtube, a blog, out to Twitter, up to my Facebook personal account and Fan Page. Within a few days my followers have left comments and retweeted. I’m in that warm glow of instantaneous feedback from people I know. But the audience I care about is actually not the people who follow me, but the people who I wish would follow me. They’re not as likely to see the post immediately. They’ll be coming in one at a time over the next few months or even years. My goal is to convert them into regular followers. You only see the mass of these stumblers in the aggregate when looking at data over time.