Analytics data is only useful if you intend on reacting to it. The same goes for real time Analytics. Its only useful if you intend on reacting to it in real time.

The usage scenario most people fall back on when I have asked them about it is a blog post or something going viral. They don't want to wait the couple hours that Google Analytics sometimes takes to update. Great, you know something is getting a lot of traction with social media or maybe gathering some links... what do you do with that?

If you don't have a plan for how to react in real time, there's no sense knowing your Analytics real time.

(The other usage case often brought up is knowing when there is an issue with your website. In my opinion, this isn't the job of an Analytics package to detect.)

It's often tough to justify from a ROI perspective, but it turns out that there is quite a bit of emotional reaction to real time analytics.

Sort of like fear of flying vs. fear of driving, people like to feel in control.

Going real time massively reduced my support ticket queue because devs stopped asking how long it takes for their reports to update!

Aside from that you can use it to identify problems early on - one of my users shipped a broken version of their game and figured it out very early because their level metrics weren't flowing in.

It's also useful for anything with a short lifespan where the hour(s) you wait for GA wastes xx% of an article/promotion/whatever's opportunity.

I would imagine if someone had a business that had dynamic activities in smaller units (like woot off or something comes to mind) it could be valuable, but you're right, ideally, analytics should be too late for anything that makes or breaks your bottom line. It's for looking back at what happened to project into the future, and you have some time to do that.

It won’t be valuable to everyone, but here are some cases off the top of my head:

- On a popular news site or blog, if a particular entry becomes very popular, you may want to follow up on the story on the same day. - On a corporate or sales site, you may want to track big stories (traffic, particular referrers) as they happen so you can respond if necessary.

I often wonder about the nature of the value of real-time stats also. It's certainly cool and I guess it's useful for certain events (after you tweet something, publish a post, etc.). After that, maybe it would be a very valuable tool for large content publishers—they could see what content is hot and pull it out to the front page, etc?