Ok first things first, I blogged about the new Google Webmasters Tools reports that are being integrated into the new version of Google Analytics back in June, well the good news is this should now be live for everyone, so check out your profiles.

Also, today, I got access to Google Analytics Real-Time (beta) – I think I’m on some kind of early release list or something, which is quite good So here are my first impressions:

The first thing I did was log into my own site and see what it looks like – I didn’t really think this through, as my own site gets around 20 visitors on it per day, the chances of anyone being on there were slim – so I log on and there is nothing, not much fun. Anyway, we all gathered round and I logged onto Alex’s football news site, this was a bit more interesting, because its a news site he can see what news stories are popular up to the second – no doubt all news sites are going to benefit from this. Here’s a quick screenshot:

That’s reasonably interesting, I’m still getting to grips with it, apart from knowing which articles are doing best, I’m not sure how to take away useful things to action from Real-Time at this point. Next up we checked out Jordan’s free games site, he gets a lot of traffic to this, we knew we’d get our best data here (bearing in mind this is my personal GA account, not the ones with our Bronco clients on). Jordan’s site is quite interesting as the spread of interest across the World is quite wide, so you can see who is from which country and what they are interested in.

Overall, very interesting, but not super useful – although I guess if you’re using social media a lot or running TV ads it might be.