What's interesting is if Google can offer this to webmasters, then somewhere inside Google they can tell about 90% of how many people are online in the internet and where they are.
Obviously not an exaggeration, it's just a mapreduce query of all that data from every service they own.
I don't have a single google service on my sites but I must be a super-tiny minority.
Not sure how big their index is right now, or how that compares to the entire web, but it is a big number regardless.
Edit: On their announcement of the Grep functionality, Blekko says they are running it against 4 billion pages. This is still only a portion of the web, but that puts it around 1 in 4 pages having Google Analytics installed.
I can't cite anything as I don't remember where I read it, but there were articles back when Google announced its acquisition of DoubleClick that if you combine Analytics, DoubleClick and AdSense, Google's tracking reaches over 90% of web surfers.
I wonder if people at startups like ChartBeat, mix panel, clicky feel like the market is validated or feel worried. Or just keep focusing on doing a better job than competitors.
I've been running W3Counter, a competing web stats service, since before Google Analytics. Before Google bought Urchin, that kind of web stats reporting was something businesses paid for. When Google released Analytics for free, I'm sure more than a few businesses were wiped out. Perception of the space changed forever and now I can't count on 1% of my users to pay for web stats, even for things GA doesn't provide.
Real-time dashboards were one of the features people were willing to pay for. Now Google does that for free as well. There's not much I can do about it. I'm sure Chartbeat and such will still find customers, but I'm sure many that may have been convinced to buy will now settle for Google's free option instead.
I don't think MixPanel's worried about it. They're not solving the same problems as Google Analytics and GA will never be a substitute for that kind of service.
The examples provided are not relevant, because chartbeat also saw a hole in Google's offering, and filled it. That is exactly the same as all the sites you mentioned. The only difference is Google is now offering real time analytics.
A counter example would be a service that provided a missing feature for a google product, that was later filled by google, but managed to survive after google launched the feature.
Honestly, I think they're probably feeling validated. GA is a 2000 pound gorilla, but this offering is very light compared to what some of the other dedicated Real Time Analytics providers give. It's possible they'll build it out further, but for now, GA Real Time probably wouldn't satisfy people who are already willing to pay for the high quality dedicated real time tools.
I've been using GoSquared for this and it has been working really well: http://www.gosquared.com/ It will be interesting to see how the new Google Analytics features compare. If they offer a GoSquared style API, that would be pretty fantastic.
No. The real-time reporting is a separate section; this change doesn't mean anything for the data in the regular reporting sections. The data Real Time uses is unfiltered and raw, and only limited dimensions are available: Geographic source, traffic source, pageview name, and maybe one or two more things. I'm sure it'll be built out over time.
Data lag is actually not bad in Analytics these days. You can choose the current day in the date range selector and, at least for my sites, get data which less than an hour old.
Obviously not an exaggeration, it's just a mapreduce query of all that data from every service they own.
I don't have a single google service on my sites but I must be a super-tiny minority.