While I do use Google Analytics to see who’s visiting my website and where they’re clicking, the one thing I wish it had is the ability to do real time tracking.

Why is real time tracking so important?

Because much of the marketing we do nowadays offers real-time results, giving us the power to quickly tweak a tactic without having to wait a full day.

Tweet about your latest blog post, and real time tracking will instantly tell you if that link is getting any click thru love. Leave a comment on a blog or post a message on a forum and you’ll immediately be able to see if anyone’s clicking on your link.

Real time analytics can be really helpful for tracking AdWords advertisements.

If you were to run a new ad campaign, you could actually observe how long visitors were on your site and what they were doing. This would allow you to adjust your ad in real-time instead of waiting to see the overall results the next day. Talk about a cash savings!

Real time tracking helped me understand how powerful (or not) my blog marketing efforts are. And for this task I use a service called Clicky Web Analytics.

How I make Clicky work for me

Whenever I post a new article to my blog I like to do a mini promotional campaign.

This includes:

• Keyword optimization
• Commenting on other blogs
• Social bookmarking
• Twitter
• Stumble Upon
• Suggesting the article to bloggers who do article round-up’s (if appropriate).

The problem with Google Analytics is that I don’t know if any of my daily efforts are making a difference, until the following day. So if I tweet about a new post three times on Tuesday, I won’t know how much of a difference its made until Wednesday.

Yes, I know in this situation I could use a shortened link service like bit.ly to do the tracking… but I prefer to use my own URL for branding purposes whenever possible.

This is where Clicky really shines. Clicky is a real-time analytics service that tells me exactly what’s happening on my site, as it happens.

Last week I did a promo campaign for my 86 Resources to Help You Become a Profitable Amazon Affiliate article.

I kept the Clicky website open in my browser so that as I complete each marketing task (forum post, blog comment, tweet, etc) I immediately see the difference that it makes. Clicky tells me which link visitors arrived from, what they’re clicking on and how long they’re staying.

Don’t do tomorrow what you could do right now

So if I tweet about a new blog post, and Clicky tells me that nobody has clicked on the link within 5-10 minutes, then I know I need to tweet it several more times throughout the day. Real time analytics allows me to see what the best time to tweet is.

If I notice that a particular article is really popular in terms of the number of clicks and how long people are staying on that page, I may decide to do a follow-up article the next day to keep the momentum going.

For instance, if you notice that your ‘how to get Twitter followers’ article is getting a lot of attention in the search engines, you can quickly write a second article, based on one of the popular keywords people are using to find your site.

That means if Clicky tells you that people are finding your ‘how to get Twitter followers’ article by Googling the term ‘twitter follower software,’ you can write an article on Twitter follower software… including your affiliate link, of course. You’d post that follow-up article on your blog the very next day to really maximize the surge of new traffic you’re already getting.

Here’s what the Clicky analytics page looks like

In one day, 73 people viewed the 86 Resources to Help You Become a Profitable Amazon Affiliate article. Looking at the Domains list, I can see which one of blog comments generated traffic.

If I click on one of the Domains links – (Blokube in the screenshot below) – Clicky shows me that the Blokube audience is very receptive to that article, and to my website in general. However other sites, didn’t deliver as much traffic, and I see that a few sites that I posted on that didn’t deliver any traffic.