Real-time analytics shows active readers, the pages they are on and where they came from, refreshed every few seconds. Newsrooms use it to spot stories taking off in the first hour, update and promote them while the wave lasts, and catch broken pages or traffic drops immediately.
Most of a news story's traffic arrives in the first hours. If your numbers arrive the next morning, the decisions that matter are already too late.
What to watch live
| View | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Active users now | is the site normal, busy or broken? |
| Top pages right now | which stories are being read |
| Sources right now | what is driving the traffic: Discover, search, social, AI |
| Trends | which pages are gaining readers compared with an hour ago |
| Countries and devices | where the audience is, mobile share |
Spotting a story taking off
A story is taking off when its readers grow quickly from one source. In the first 30–60 minutes look for a page climbing the top list with most of its readers from a single source such as Google Discover or Facebook. That is the moment to act.
What to do in the first hour
- Update the article: add facts, a better image, a clear first paragraph.
- Add internal links to related stories so the wave spreads.
- Promote it on the channels that are not yet sending readers.
- Write the follow-up while the topic is hot.
Catching problems
Real time is also an alarm. A sudden fall to near zero usually means a tracking or site problem, not lost readers: a deployment, a caching plugin minifying the script, a CDN rule. A spike from one unknown referrer can be a bot; good tools filter known bots before counting.
How PubPulse does real time
The Real Time section refreshes every 10 seconds: overview, content, sources, countries, events and trends. Hits are written within a second, so the numbers are live, and the same data feeds every historical report — there is no separate, approximate real-time dataset.
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