Real-Time Reports on the Busiest Shopping Day

The sale email goes out this morning

Today is Black Friday. For a shop running a sale, the email goes out this morning, and the next few hours decide how the day goes.

The usual reports in Analytics are little help today. They can take hours to fill in, and by the time they show a broken link, the morning's visitors have gone.

The real-time reports show what is happening now: how many people are on the site, where they came from, which pages they are on and whether anyone has finished an order.

They are the only reports that can still change today's result.

What the real-time reports show

• Overview: people on the site right now, and pageviews by the minute.
• Traffic Sources: where the people arriving now came from.
• Content: which pages they are looking at.
• Locations: roughly where they are.
• Events: clicks and other actions, if the site records them.
• Conversions: goals completed in the last half hour.

The last needs work in advance. Real-time can only show completed orders if a goal exists for them, usually the page shown after payment.

Before the email goes out

Add campaign tags to every link in the email: a source, a medium of email and a campaign name. Without them, many email visitors arrive looking like direct traffic, or like referrals from a webmail site.

Tag the links in the day's social posts the same way, each network with its own source, so every channel shows up separately.

Set a goal for the order confirmation page, and another for the first step of checkout if you can.

Then send the email to yourself first. Open Real-Time, click each link and watch your own visit appear, on the right page and labelled as email. If it does not, fix it before the list receives it.

The first ten minutes

Within minutes of sending, the number of people on the site should climb. If it does not, the email may be stuck or its links broken, so check the email platform before anything else.

In Traffic Sources, email should appear as a medium and grow. In Content, the sale page should be near the top of the list.

If the top page is the home page, the links probably point there. If it is a page titled Page not found, they point nowhere.

Pages people land on by mistake

The Content report lists the pages people are on, by title and address. Read it as a list of where the email and the ads are actually sending people.

A missing page shows up by its title within minutes. So does last year's sale page, still live and still linked from somewhere, and a product page for an item that sold out at nine.

Most of these can be fixed with a redirect in a few minutes, which is why someone should be watching today rather than reading about it on Monday.

Watching for finished orders

A busy site with no goals completing is the most important warning real-time can give.

If people are on product pages and in the cart but Conversions shows nothing for twenty minutes, place an order yourself. Payment, shipping options and coupon codes are where a checkout usually breaks during a sale.

If clicks on the add to cart button are recorded as events, they show whether people are trying to buy at all.

A worked example

A used bookstore in an old commercial block sells second-hand and collectible books in the shop, and lists its better stock in a small online store on its website.

Last Black Friday it emailed its list at seven in the morning: a third off everything online until midnight. The owner kept Real-Time open on the counter computer.

Visitors arrived within minutes, and the top page in Content was Page not found.

The email's button pointed to the address the sale page had as a draft, and it had been published at a different one. A redirect fixed it before eight.

By mid-morning there were people in the cart and no completed orders. A test order showed why: the shop had started shipping across Canada that autumn, but its shipping rates only covered addresses in BC.

Once the missing rates were added, completed orders began to appear in Conversions within minutes.

This year the links carry campaign tags, a second goal tracks the first step of checkout, and both problems are on a checklist for the night before.

What real-time cannot tell you

Real-time counts goals, not revenue. For sales figures, the shop's own order list is quicker and more reliable today.

It cannot say whether the sale is profitable, how today compares with last year, or which visitors will come back and buy next week.

Small numbers swing, too. A quiet minute is not a trend, and a spike can be one person opening tabs. Referral spam can turn up in real-time just as it does in the other reports.

Use it to catch problems, and leave the judgements for the full reports next week.

After the sale

When the day is over, add annotations in Analytics for when the email went out and when each fix was made. Otherwise next year's comparison will show an odd morning that nobody can explain.

Next week, the full reports show which landing pages held people and which lost them. That is the time to judge the sale, with the order totals beside them.

The counter-case

A shop with a handful of visitors an hour will see too little in real-time to read. There, testing every link and placing a test order before sending does most of the work, and the order list does the rest.

A business without online checkout gets less from it as well, though watching where email visitors land is still worth a few minutes.

For any shop sending a sale email today, keep the real-time reports open for the first hour.

Black Friday morning

1. Tag every link in the sale email.
2. Set a goal for the order confirmation page.
3. Click each link yourself before the list does.
4. Watch Traffic Sources as the email arrives.
5. Read the Content list for missing pages.
6. Watch Conversions for completed orders.
7. Keep someone free to fix things quickly.

Step five catches the costliest mistake of the day. A broken link costs every person who clicks it, and the Content report shows it within minutes of the first click.

Getting the sale page itself ready in time is covered in Black Friday sale pages built early.

Frequently asked questions

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