New Feature- Google Analytics Alerts

Google Analytics can be used to automatically check your website for conversion watching, erratic trend changes, or unusual traffic patterns. There are events and actions that happen on every web site that would be interesting to know about. It could be something as simple as a pay per click landing page conversion.

Alert Types

There are only two types of alerts that are available; they include custom alerts and automatic. Automatic alerts require no interaction from the user to work. Custom alerts will allow you to create your own alert. But first, it is important that you understand the automatic alert features are already available to you. When you navigate to the intelligence navigation link you will see automatic alerts that Google has determined by its own algorithm programmed into automatic alerts.

So you can see in the screen capture below on November 12, 2009 I had five alerts.

But what do these of alerts mean? Actually they are incredibly intelligent; at a glance we can see that the first one is a conversion rate issue.

  1. Conversion rate speaks directly to the heart of the matter –your website mission or goals. The 500% increase in goal conversion took place in this alert. That’s worth knowing about. Additionally, we can see that the converting traffic source was organic. Of course the only way you will get this kind of report from automatic alerts is to have goals configured in the first place.
  2. I had a 500% increase in new visitor traffic. 50 new visits came to my site but if we take a look at the significance indicator, we can see that it is not as important as the alert above.
  3. My pages were viewed 70% more on this day and the source of traffic that was responsible for the increase in viewing was from organic mediums
  4. Per visit goal value has increased 500%. This means that organic traffic streams are becoming more valuable to the goals of my website. Again, you will need to have goals configured to have access to this presentation of report data.
  5. When new visitors have increased as they relate to the per visit goal value by 500%.

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Sort your Report Data by Dimension

If you want to see your data in a different presentation click the hyperlink in the upper right hand corner to view by dimension.

That’s pretty cool stuff if you think about it; I didn’t actually program or set up anything. In this case the automatic reports are a little deceiving because the site went live very recently. So you can see that the “expected” amount is zero. Heck, it still looks pretty good! But there’s more, if we look in the upper right hand side of your Google Analytics interface you will find a slider. The slider has a low and high sensitivity level, if set to the highest level you will see all the automatic reports that Google Analytics offers for your website.

What about creating an advanced custom segment?

No problem, click the create segment link you can see in the screen capture above.

Custom Alerts

Just like the name infers you make your own alert based on your own interest. There are many a alert conditions you can work with and set up. In the example below I’ve created a report to be notified when my goal value exceeds $50.00.

I can even have my alerts e-mail to me if I want.

I can see a great possibility for this new feature added to the Google Analytics users interface. It is an intelligent algorithm that can automatically or manually help you track the important events that occur on your website. It is a huge time saver if you compare it to the time you can spend sorting through data to find the gold nuggets.

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Google Analytics Training Video Series

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