Blekko's new Grep tool shows that 1.3 Billion URLs on 12.4 million domains are using Google Analytics. http://blekko.com/webgrep?page=view&id=f6c212b83629fe094...

Not sure how big their index is right now, or how that compares to the entire web, but it is a big number regardless.

Edit: On their announcement of the Grep functionality, Blekko says they are running it against 4 billion pages. This is still only a portion of the web, but that puts it around 1 in 4 pages having Google Analytics installed.

My guess is the real time processing is only done if the real time view is open.

I don't think more than 10% of all sites have analytics installed.

But if you include other services and products like toolbar and adsense, Google can surely see a great deal of what's happening on the Internet.

I've been running W3Counter, a competing web stats service, since before Google Analytics. Before Google bought Urchin, that kind of web stats reporting was something businesses paid for. When Google released Analytics for free, I'm sure more than a few businesses were wiped out. Perception of the space changed forever and now I can't count on 1% of my users to pay for web stats, even for things GA doesn't provide.

Real-time dashboards were one of the features people were willing to pay for. Now Google does that for free as well. There's not much I can do about it. I'm sure Chartbeat and such will still find customers, but I'm sure many that may have been convinced to buy will now settle for Google's free option instead.

I don't think MixPanel's worried about it. They're not solving the same problems as Google Analytics and GA will never be a substitute for that kind of service.

Neither--We heavily plan to do what we did yesterday: keep our heads down and continue to work.

Honestly, I think they're probably feeling validated. GA is a 2000 pound gorilla, but this offering is very light compared to what some of the other dedicated Real Time Analytics providers give. It's possible they'll build it out further, but for now, GA Real Time probably wouldn't satisfy people who are already willing to pay for the high quality dedicated real time tools.

No. The real-time reporting is a separate section; this change doesn't mean anything for the data in the regular reporting sections. The data Real Time uses is unfiltered and raw, and only limited dimensions are available: Geographic source, traffic source, pageview name, and maybe one or two more things. I'm sure it'll be built out over time.

Data lag is actually not bad in Analytics these days. You can choose the current day in the date range selector and, at least for my sites, get data which less than an hour old.

Nope. Only a few specific new reports (says the article).