What is Real-Time Analytics?
Real-time analytics is one of the most powerful technologies out there. It can provide a window into your company's performance, enabling you to make better decisions and improve processes. The challenge is that real-time data can be difficult to setup and overwhelming if you're not sure how to use it. In this guide, we'll break down what real-time analytics is, how you can make it easy and why it matters for your digital publishing business.
Contents:
- Real-Time Analytics Explained
- How can it be used?
- Real-Time Analytics works for businesses of all sizes
- Advantages of Real-Time Data
- Drawbacks of Real-Time Data
- How to Track Real-time Data with Spiny
- Conclusion
Real-Time Analytics Explained Real-time analytics is a constant analysis process of your business's data. It tracks every action within your business in real-time and compiles gathered data in one report within seconds of it taking place. That means it's not a retrospective analysis, but rather an ongoing process that happens simultaneously with the actions of your business. For a digital publisher this can help you adapt your editorial strategy on the fly and meet your business goals on a daily basis.
The practical applications for this type of system are numerous and varied, but can be broken down into two categories: analysis and editorial strategy.
Analysis: Real-time analytics helps publishers better understand their audience interests live by allowing you to see which articles, authors and sources are perfoming best:
- What demographic of users is most active/interested in your content,
- What kind of sessions are providing the most value (High Pages per Session (PPS), Revenue per Session (RPS) and more)
- Which writers are performing best and what about their content is resonating so well
- Which sources are providing the most views and revenue at various points during the day
- What is trending most with your audience globally, so you can create content to meet demand These are just a few analysis options, but the analysis use cases are endless! By understanding your business information in real-time, you can make changes immediately based on intelligent data, instead of having to wait weeks or even months before making improvements based on historical data.
Strategy: In addition to being able to monitor audience activity when they're engaged with your content, you've also got access to advanced metrics such as eCPM figures by authour, source and article. This will tell you how effectively your content is performing after visiting through certain channels. This will allow digital publishers to focus efforts on what drives the highest value for the business, saving time, and providing a better user experience.
How can it be used? Real-time analytics is used in a variety of industries, including retail, marketing, finance, and healthcare. This allows businesses to make decisions (and take action) based on the latest data available. For digital publishers real-time analytics can be used to help meet revenue goals, adjust your editorial strategy to audience demands and improve your editorial team's output.
Real-time analytics can help you track data as it happens so you can take advantage of opportunities or address problems immediately. For example: Real-time analytics can be used to track the success of Marketing Campaigns—you could use real-time data to determine which subscription offers are most effective if you're a subscription-focused digital publisher. Then you can work with your team to optimize further by making changes to the design that articles hooks are put onto or how long a user has been site before offering them a subscription.
Real-Time Analytics works for businesses of all sizes Real-time analytics can be used by businesses of all sizes and in all industries, here’s how it can work for each of them:
- Startups that want simple tools on the cloud so they don't have to worry about investing heavily in infrastructure before finding out whether or not anyone wants what they're publishing. Real-time analytics can be especially helpful in creating content that resonates with your target audience or finding your target audience.
- Small businesses that need to monitor their operations in real-time to ensure that customers are satisfied and employees are productive. When you being to scale into managing a team of writers it can be challenging to establish goals and input success criteria. Real-time analytics helps here, so everyone, including writers themselves, can see what's perfoming and make changes to increase their effectiveness.
- Large companies that want data about their operations at their fingertips so they can respond quickly when necessary (and avoid making mistakes). It's particularly useful for those with a large number of writers or a large audience, as they can use real-time analytics to gain deeper insights on audience behavior and plan their editorial strategy accordingly. For example, you can quickly see if your content isn't meeting your daily performance crieria. With the data real-time analytics tools, such as Spiny.ai provice, you can quickly adjust strategy to increase effective content and not cause a big miss in revenues for the day.
Advantages of Real-Time Data Real-time analytics is a powerful tool for businesses because it allows them to make better decisions, faster. It can help you identify trends and patterns, as well as anomalies. This helps you understand your data better and improve competitiveness by making sure you have the most precise information available at all times.
On3 is a big propoent of real-time analytics, attributing much of their editorial success to being able to make informed changes in real time. > On3 and Real-time
Real-time analytics also has some built-in benefits that don't necessarily have anything to do with the technology itself:
- Automated intelligence: Real-time solutions are tailor-made for users who want their machines to think for them—and they're often easier than human labour when it comes down to it. For example, if a company owner wants his software program to run machine learning algorithms on incoming customer data so that writers/analysts don't have to constantly rework reports themselves every month, then this option might be worth exploring further (depending on cost).
- Improved competitiveness: As mentioned earlier in this guide, real-time solutions allow businesses both large and small access tools like predictive analytics which weren't previously available outside of corporate environments due to high-cost requirements associated with missing out on valuable insights about what customers really want before making purchasing decisions; this means more accurate forecasts which ultimately leads us back again into competitive advantage territory!
- Improved decision-making: Real-time solutions allow businesses access to the right information at the right time so that they can make smarter decisions. A lot of this has to do with predictive analytics, by looking at previous trends and content that resonate with customers and have high volume. This allows business owners to plan more accurately new content that is more likely to gain high visibility with the specific target customers. Creating high volume and visibility for your website increases the chances of conversion and revenue, but in addition to this, you will have loyal customers that interact with your content time and time again. It's easier to identify and work on new strategies, such as campaigns that are in line with their audiences interests.
Smart business owners know that having access to the right information at the right time is critical for success. It's why more and more companies are turning to real-time solutions like automatic intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics. By leveraging these tools, businesses can learn how to better serve their customers in an increasingly competitive marketplace which ultimately leads us back again into competitive advantage territory!
Drawbacks of Real-Time Data The most significant challenge with real-time analytics is data latency. It’s not that easy to collect and process large amounts of data in real-time. There are several reasons for this:
- Data volume: The amount of information that can be collected from various sources (social media, emails, website visits, etc.) is growing exponentially. In addition, it often takes time for employees to enter all their activities into a system so they can be captured by an analytics tool.
- Data complexity: More than ever before, companies need to analyze a wide variety of different types of data that come from different sources or use a variety of formats such as images/videos and text messages.
- Data velocity: Users expect results almost instantly because they access them through mobile devices on the go while working out or driving home after work (or even while relaxing at home). This means there may be no way for users to wait until you finish processing before they get their answer!
The simple way to solve most of these disadvantages is to utilize a market leading proven software, such as Spiny.ai to ensure accuracy and good data.
How to Track Real-time Data with Spiny Spiny offers a real-time data product for publishers to be on top of their business performance. With Spiny Live, customers have access to real-time analysis on all aspects of their business:
- Content and author performance
- Revenue performance
- Traffic sources and channel optimization
- Editorial team output and content diversification
- Predictive forecasts of the day (revenue and audience metrics)
- Trending topics and more… With this information, users benefit from improved decision-making, rapid trend detection, quick identification of issues and better customer service overall.
The data is presented in a very accessible way, which is great as it can be used by both new and experienced users. The platform also provides a wide range of reports that are easy to access and understand, which helps improve the efficiency of your business. The dashboard gives you a clear overview of all important metrics like revenue, traffic sources, performance ads and much more.
Conclusion In this article, we've explored the idea of real-time analytics and how it can be easily applied to digital publishers. We've covered what real-time analytics is, why you need it, and its benefits.
When you're ready to start implementing this technology in your business, it's important to remember that it is easier to implement than you might think. Here at Spiny, offering real-time solutions to digital publishing data problems has been a key ojective. Overall, using an analytics tool like Spiny can make daily operations simpler and more efficient, as you will have the necessary information to make effective decisions!
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