Quick answer
Realtime analytics is a live view of current visitors and events, updated every few seconds, used to check that launches, campaigns and fixes are working as they happen.
Formula: online visitors = distinct visitors with any activity in the last 5 minutes (TapCub)
What "online now" means
The web has no "logged in" state for anonymous visitors, so "online" is always a window: visitors who did something in the last few minutes. Tools pick different windows — 1 minute, 5 minutes, 30 minutes — which is why live counts rarely match between tools. A shorter window reacts faster; a longer one is more stable.
Alongside the count, realtime views usually show a stream of recent events: page opened, button clicked, order placed, with page, source and country.
What realtime is good for
- Launch checks — the email went out; are people arriving, and on the right page?
- Tracking checks — you added an event; click it and watch it appear.
- Incident checks — after a deploy, are checkouts still coming in?
- Talking to visitors — someone has been on the checkout page for three minutes; a short message may help.
It is not good for judging performance. A few minutes of data are noisy; compare days and weeks in the regular reports.
How TapCub realtime works
TapCub counts a visitor as online when they had any activity in the last five minutes. The realtime view is pushed to the browser every two seconds over a server-sent event stream: the online count, a 30-minute trend, and new events since the last update, with human and bot events in separate streams so a crawler burst does not look like a launch.
The same live visitor list is used by the chat inbox. If you have TapCub live chat, you can open a conversation with someone you see in realtime — their widget shows a preview card with your message — instead of waiting for them to write first.
Common mistakes
- Watching it all day. Minute-by-minute numbers move randomly. Set a monitor for the drops that matter instead.
- Comparing live counts across tools. Each uses its own window.
- Testing with your own visits only. Filters that exclude internal traffic will hide your test clicks; check filters first.
- Forgetting bots. A sudden live spike from one network is more often a crawler than a campaign.
Related guides: Web Analytics Audit. See also data latency.
See also
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Product Experience Specialist
Writes about product experience, practical workflows, and growth, turning complex processes into clear steps for everyday decisions.