How often does Google Analytics update?

Submitted by winter on Fri, 11/02/2007 - 07:35.

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I have often wondered how often Google Analytics updates and I set out to find that out today. One thing you need to keep in mind, regardless of how often it updates or refreshes, is that the best time to view your stats is the next day. You will notice that if you check your stats at 2-3 am it will account for every hour, but when you view the stats at around noon, the actual number of visits and keywords used to reach your site has risen.

Google claims the data is updated every 24 hours, but the true number I have reached is about every half hour to hour the data is update. I believe the number to be close to an hour as Google Adsense has about an hour of lag in data (Google Adsense can show real time, just some times you may experience an hour in lag as to keep the report as accurate as possible. A lot of data has to be compiled with both services, and with the immense number of customers, you can't get it all in real time.)

If you want more information on Google Analytics, try visiting google.com/analytics. There are many helpful hints and tips for using the tracking software inside their FAQ, and many many people have written some very good information about the free software. If your using something other than Google Analytic, you should really consider switching unless your are dealing with very large amounts of data that you need to store, as Google Analytics versus a corporate solution would be silly when you have over 10,000 uniques a day.