Realtime

Who is on your site now, and every event as it arrives. Realtime always shows the last 30 minutes and updates live over an open connection, with no refresh button to press.

Updated

When to use it

  • You just installed the tracker and want to see your first events arrive.
  • A launch, a post or an email just went out, and you want to watch people land.
  • You shipped a new event and want to check it fires with the right properties.

Reading the page

  • People on site right now. The big number counts distinct people with an event in the last five minutes.
  • Live activity: every event as it arrives, newest first.
  • Active pages: the top pages people viewed, with how many people viewed each.
  • Arriving from: the referrers of those pageviews.
  • Countries: where people are.

Compare to yesterday is on by default. It draws a dashed “ghost” of the same time yesterday behind the numbers, for example 41 at this time yesterday. Tap it to turn it off.

The live feed

  • Pause freezes the list so you can read it. Live totals keep updating while it is paused, and up to the 50 newest incoming events are kept. Press Resume to catch up. The button shows how many are waiting.
  • Click an event to open Event details: when it occurred, the source, the person, the session and its properties. Sensitive fields are removed before they reach your browser. Same event, Same person and Same session narrow the feed to match, and Copy JSON copies the event.
  • Above the feed you can narrow the list with Search event, person or session, or with an exact event name, person ID or session ID. These narrow the feed only.

If the connection drops, the page says Connection interrupted, keeps the events it had, and reconnects by itself. Reconnect now tries straight away.

Filters

Realtime has its own filter bar, and it narrows everything on the page, live:

  • People: a saved segment.
  • Window: always Last 30 minutes. It can’t be changed.
  • Source: one source, or all of them.
  • Filter: one event property filter. Type a property (such as plan) and a value (such as pro), then choose equals for an exact match or contains, which ignores case.

Realtime’s property filter is simpler than the report filter bar. It takes one property at a time and matches text values.

Tips and gotchas

  • “Right now” means the last five minutes. The feed and panels cover 30 minutes.
  • Segment figures can be withheld. If membership can’t be checked for a moment, the numbers show a dash rather than a misleading zero, and the page retries every minute.
  • Your own visits count. Open your site in another tab and you appear in the feed. That is a quick way to test an install.
  • For anything older than 30 minutes, use the Events explorer.

Recipes

Is my new install working?

  1. Open Realtime in one tab and your website in another.
  2. Click around your site.
  3. Watch Live activity. Pageviews and clicks should appear within seconds.
Nothing arriving? Check the snippet and the source’s allowed domains in Sources.

Does my new “Plan upgraded” event carry the right plan?

  1. Trigger the event yourself in your product.
  2. In the feed, narrow to the exact event name Plan upgraded.
  3. Click the event and read its properties in Event details.

Where are people landing from after we posted on social media?

  1. Open Realtime just after the post goes live.
  2. Keep Compare to yesterday on to see the lift.
  3. Read Arriving from and Active pages.

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