Google Analytics has launched real-time data, allowing news sites to see how many readers are online and gauge the success of individual tweets.

The development was announced on the Google blog last week and is being rolled out  over the coming weeks.

You can sign-up for early access using this form.

The Google blog illustrates how real-time can be used to monitor the impact of social media.

For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post. By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.

Meanwhile, Google is also launching a premium analytics account with additonal analysis and support for an annual fixed fee, according to this blog post which has more details.

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