Greater Intelligence from Google Analyticsby Stephanie Lummis

Wouldn’t it be great to find out in real-time if online sales spiked or plummeted?

Now you can.

Try out the newly available ‘alerts’ feature in Google Analytics, found in the Intelligence section of the menu. It allows you to create alerts for a variety of metrics and dimensions. When the alert condition is met, i.e. bounce rate spikes above 60% for a particular page, you’re sent an email. The email provides a link directly into the report on Google Analytics.

The value of this is tremendous. You can learn about atypical behaviour – good or bad – as it happens. It is much easier to diagnose the “why” as its occurring, rather than when you do your regular check-in. Then you can work to replicate or avoid that behaviour, as the case may be.

Automatic and Custom Alerts
GA has provided a number of pre-set automatic alerts. These are for standard metrics such as visitors or total traffic. You can adjust your ‘sensitivity’ levels from low to high, depending on your view of atypical, thus changing when alerts are triggered. On their own automatic alerts can be quite useful – but the custom alerts are where the real insights can be uncovered.

Custom options let you create alerts based on a wide range of dimensions and metrics, so you can really delve deep into the data. GA suggests a number of custom alerts for you, to get you thinking about what’s important to you. Some examples include:

• Unique visitors decreases by more than 50.0%
• Average time on site decreases by more than 30.0%
• Goal conversion rate increases by more than 20.0%

How can you slice these metrics to give you even more insights? Think about the campaigns and segments that you are actively engaged with. Perhaps you regularly send out promotional emails and you know that these visitors usually buy more than others. Create a custom alert that says “let me know when the conversion rate from source=email decreases by more than 20%.”

Perhaps you’ve done some search engine optimization and you want to see how effective it is. Create an alert that notifies you when visitors from a keyword phrase containing “web”, for example, increases by X% or spends X time on site.

Running an ad campaign in New England? Get notified when visitors from specific states make a purchase.

The options are endless. If your organization has an active campaign in the marketplace, or is targeting a specific segment, there is a custom alert for you. I encourage you to log on and try them out – turn that data into intelligence!