Real-Time Analytics

There are moments in affiliate operations where the right tool is a live stream, not yesterday's report. A campaign just launched and you need to see whether the first clicks are tracking. A new postback integration is being tested and you need to confirm the conversions are landing in the right place. A partner just turned on a new offer and you need to verify the redirect chain works end-to-end. In all of those moments, last hour's batched report is too slow and the refresh-the-dashboard ritual is too painful to repeat fifty times.

Routy's real-time analytics solves that by streaming every click and every conversion into a dedicated live view the moment they fire. Events appear within seconds, in the order they happened, with the source, amount, and click ID attached. You watch the traffic happen instead of waiting for a report to catch up.

After turning on the live view, the following becomes available:

• Live click stream: every click hits the dashboard the second it lands. No batching, no polling, no refresh button. The stream uses a persistent connection so new clicks appear automatically as they arrive.
• Live conversion stream: the same thing for conversions, with source, amount, currency, click ID, and event name attached as the conversion fires. The conversion shows up tied to its originating click so the full attribution chain is visible.
• Filter the firehose: scope the stream to a specific link, a specific traffic source, a specific campaign, or a specific affiliate. When you're launching one campaign you don't want every other click in the account drowning out the events you're trying to watch.
• Built for the moments that matter: campaign launches (is the tracking working?), postback debugging (is the conversion firing back?), integration testing (does the click ID flow all the way through?), and the first hour of any new traffic source (are we seeing the volume we expected?). The live view is the right tool for each of those situations.
• Per-event detail: clicking on any event in the stream expands the full detail — user agent, geo, referrer, query string, every attribution field — so you can investigate individual events in real time rather than waiting for a report to be populated.

The live view isn't a replacement for the regular dashboards. It's the right tool for the launch window, the debug session, the integration test — moments where the data is changing fast enough that any view based on aggregate windows is too coarse.

You open the live event view from the dashboard. The view connects to Routy's event stream over a persistent connection (WebSocket-based), and events appear in the stream as they're processed by the backend. The processing delay between an event firing on the source side and appearing in the stream is typically under a second; in practice it's frequently under 200ms.

Filters apply server-side, so a stream scoped to a single link or traffic source doesn't transmit the rest of the account's traffic over the wire — useful for very high-volume accounts where the unfiltered stream would be too much to look at anyway.

A few practical notes:

• The stream is read-only. It shows events as they happen but doesn't let you modify or replay them. For historical investigation, the regular reporting interfaces are the right tool.
• Browser tabs left open for hours don't accumulate event backlog — the stream forward-only, so reopening the tab after a break shows you the events from that moment forward, not a backlog of everything you missed.
• For very high-volume accounts (millions of events per hour), the stream can be sampled — you see a representative slice rather than every individual event — to keep the UI usable. Sampling kicks in automatically based on stream throughput.

Most of the value of real-time analytics shows up in two specific situations: integration debugging and campaign launches.

For integration debugging, the live stream is the difference between "the test postback fired, did it work?" being answered in 5 seconds and the same question being answered in 30 minutes after you refresh the report enough times. Anyone who's had to debug a postback that wasn't firing has felt the difference between those two timescales — the 5-second feedback loop lets you iterate on the configuration, the 30-minute one means you debug by trial and error across multiple test sessions.

For campaign launches, the live stream lets you see whether the traffic is hitting the right links, whether the click IDs are coming through, whether the conversions are tracking, and whether the geo distribution matches what you expected — all within the first few minutes rather than the next morning. Mistakes that get caught in the first 15 minutes of a launch cost much less than the same mistakes caught the next day.

For everyday reporting, the live view is overkill — that's what the aggregated dashboards are for. The point of real-time is that when you need it, you really need it, and the alternative is opening another tab to refresh a report that wasn't designed for that use case.