Real-time Search List

If you're looking for a website traffic tracking tool that shows you your real-time search list, then look no further. HitTail is one of those rare tools where you can just install the code, and sit back and watch your search hits as they occur in real-time. You don't have to wait a day for data collection to occur. You don't even need to hit F5 to do a refresh. HitTail works the way everyone wishes the log files worked--a de-duped list of your visitors, so you see only one entry for each human visiting your site, and you only see the data regarding what led them to your site. It's like watching your real-time list of referrers, with the keywords highlighted for easy insight. Give it a try. It will make you wonder why everyone doesn't just show the real-time search list as an analytics report.

Why real time reporting matters for PPC advertising

Real-time reporting helps PPC managers identify trends before they become costly. Instead of waiting for Google AdWords reports, PPC managers can use HitTail to spot abnormal activity in their paid search campaigns in real-time. Watching the real time report in HitTail often shows clicks for broad match keywords that advertisers should not be bidding on or shows a discrepancy in clicks that HitTail records compared to what Google reports. This discrepancy can sometimes be attributed to click fraud.

Here are some examples of both scenarios:

1) HitTail identifies negative keywords that drive up the cost of broad match campaigns

Example - Martin Kelley used HitTail to discover that Google was misdirecting his ads which ended up saving his client $20K.

2) HitTail can detect click fraud

Sometimes there is a discrepancy between the number of clicks Google reports vs what appears in HitTail's real time report.

Example - David Kyle discusses his experience with HitTail detecting click fraud for his AdWords campaign. Recently, Google reported 6 clicks and HitTail reported only one in the same time period. David verified that the additional clicks were from a Chinese IP address that was sending fraudulent clicks to a geo-targeted campaign for a city in North Carolina. See this forum discussion and thread for more details.

The best part about this is the fact that you can make these observations way before your AdWords or Analytics reports become available. With this data, PPC managers can log in to their AdWords campaigns and make the necessary adjustments, potentially saving money for their client in wasted clicks that could go undetected without the use of HitTail.

For that reason alone, Pay Per Click managers should consider trying HitTail Premium to stay on top of their paid search campaigns in order to make adjustments in real time that could save money in the long run.

Google Analytics Broken?

What do you do when Google Analytics goes down, and you don't have the privilege of viewing yesterday's data? You switch over to real-time data and see it today--as it comes in! This blog has an idea, as does this one.

eBay buys StumbleUpon, Google jabs eBay

With eBay rumored to buy StumbleUpon and Google announcing plans to develop a StumbleUpon competitor, the need for "real-time analytics" has skyrocketed. The main thing about these services, and services like Digg, is that they cause sudden traffic spikes, instead of the evenly distributed swell that Google index inclusion creates. As such, there are important hosting and social networking elements to consider. First, you must be able to sustain maybe 100,000 visits in a single day. Second, you must be able to identify when such surges are occurring and take action on THE SAME DAY to leverage the new traffic. Do you have a call-to-action on that page? Is all the traffic bouncing? For these reasons and more, you need HitTail, and the ability to watch your referrer traffic in real-time. Watch the Digg Effect, the StumbleUpon Effect, and soon, the Google Effect, in real-time.