Real-Time Analytics: What It Shows and What It Doesn't

Real-time analytics answers one question: who is on your site right now? Here's what that means in practice — and where the limits are.

What real-time shows

Current active visitors — the number of people currently viewing pages on your site. "Currently" typically means within the last minute or few minutes, depending on how the tool defines active sessions.

Current page distribution — if multiple visitors are active at once, which pages are they on? This is useful during launches or when a piece of content goes viral — you can see traffic distributing across your pages in real-time.

Live event feed — some tools show a live stream of pageview events as they arrive. You can see each page load as it happens.

Real-time data is most useful in specific moments:

Launch day: you can watch traffic arrive as your announcement spreads
Shared content: when a post gets picked up and shared, you can see the spike develop
Live events: if you're hosting a webinar or running an ad campaign, you can monitor whether the traffic is arriving as expected

Technical implementation

Real-time analytics works by displaying recently collected data with minimal delay. The key is the time window: what counts as "real-time"?

In Antlytics, the real-time indicator updates on a short polling interval. When a pageview is recorded (a POST to the ingest endpoint), it becomes visible in the real-time count within that interval.

This means real-time data is slightly delayed from the actual moment of the visit — typically by a few seconds to a minute. For practical purposes (launch monitoring, traffic spikes) this is fine. For applications requiring sub-second precision, you would need a different architecture.

What real-time doesn't show

Individual visitor identity — privacy-first analytics does not identify who is visiting. The real-time counter shows "3 active visitors" — not who they are, where they came from, or anything that could identify them.

Session history of current visitors — you can see that someone is on /pricing, but not what pages they visited before or after.

Conversion context — if a visitor is currently on your signup page, you don't know whether they signed up until a goal completion event fires (which is itself anonymised).

This is a meaningful difference from Google Analytics' real-time view, which shows each user's active session including device, location, and page-by-page journey. Privacy-first real-time is aggregate — how many people are active and where — not individual.

Use cases where real-time helps

Confirming tracking is working. Open the real-time view, visit your own site, and confirm your visit appears. This is the quickest way to verify the tracking snippet is installed and firing correctly.

Launch monitoring. During a product launch or announcement, watch the real-time visitor count climb. Combined with the referrers view, you can see which announcement channel drove the traffic.

Event monitoring. If you're running a live event with a registration page, real-time traffic to the registration page correlates with demand. A spike means your promotion worked.

Debugging. If you made a change to your site and want to verify it didn't break something, real-time gives immediate feedback before you have to wait for daily reports.

Limitations vs GA real-time

Google Analytics' real-time view is more detailed than Antlytics' because GA collects more data per visitor. GA shows:

Individual user locations on a map
Each user's active session with page history
Device type and browser per active visitor
Real-time funnel visualisation

These features exist because GA records personal data. Privacy-first tools trade that granularity for privacy compliance. The aggregate real-time count (how many people, on which pages) is enough for most use cases — but it is less than what GA provides.

FAQ

Why is my real-time count lower than I expected? Several reasons: ad blockers can prevent the tracking script from firing; bots are filtered; sessions with very short activity may have already expired. Real-time counts the currently active sessions, not cumulative visitors for the day.

Can I share a real-time view with stakeholders? The Antlytics dashboard is login-gated. If you want to share a live view with stakeholders during a launch, you can share your screen or set up a shared team login. Public dashboards are not currently available.

Is the real-time count available in the API? Not currently. The real-time visitor count is a dashboard feature that uses session-based authentication. It is not part of the public token-authenticated API. The API reference covers the available endpoints — stats, top pages, and referrers over a date range.

What does "active" mean? How long until a visitor is no longer counted? A visitor is counted as active if they have loaded a page within the active window (typically the last few minutes). Once that window passes without a new pageview from that session, the visitor is no longer counted as active.