Stay Alert with Google Analytics

I move fast because I pretty much hang out in the far-left lane. I also have to keep a lot of plates spinning. One of the drawbacks to moving at a breakneck pace (besides, of course, the potential for breaking your neck) is it’s easy to miss things. Important things.

As a site owner, there’s nothing worse than looking in your rear view mirror and seeing something like this — after the tsunami of visits has receded back to sea without you ever knowing.

Quintessential D’oh! moment, right? Think of the conversion and engagement opportunities that could have been seized if someone would have been keeping their finger on that pulse.

Google Analytics has an intelligence engine that enables you to set alerts to avoid missing opportunities that come along and are only white hot momentarily — or help you spot a troubling trend before it spirals out of control, like this poor client experienced.

Practical Uses for Alerts in Google Analytics

I’m not going to go through the specifics of how to set up alerts in Google Analytics. Google has provided videos on how to use both automatic and custom alerts. What I’m going to talk about are everyday business problems that could be monitored through the use of alerts.

Scenario 1: You want to run an after-summer clearance sale and send out spam emails to your subscribers.

First, bravo for tracking links in your emails. If you’re not doing this, you might as well throw spaghetti against the wall because, although email service providers are including pretty sophisticated analytics baked into their services, once that traffic gets to your site, they’re cut loose if you didn’t tag your links. (If you don’t know how to tag your email links, read this post on the Google Analytics blog.)

With that out of the way, you may want to set a threshold for your bounce rate (let’s say 40%) and create an alert that prompts you whenever the bounce rate for traffic from that campaigns exceeds 40%. It would look something like this:

If you had a monthly newsletter that goes out, you could choose Contains instead of Matches exactly and choose a word that’s only in your newsletter campaign name. Or if you want to lump all of your email campaigns (or banners or whatevs), you could choose Matches regular expression and separate them with pipe characters, e.g., bogo|shoemania|manic+monday.

Note: Google Analytics even allows you to be alerted on your mobile phone. It may deal the final death blow to your social life, but with the additional money you’ll make from setting up these alerts, you can buy make more friends. Kidding! <wink>

Scenario 2: You’re an in-house SEO who has been tasked with the goal of increasing organic, non-branded traffic.

Been there, lost sleep over that. Really wish I would have been an analytics ninja then. <doleful sigh>

But enough about me ….

Simply set up a monthly alert that lets you know whenever your organic, non-branded traffic decreases by [x%] and/or increases by [y%]. You should already have an advanced segment for your non-brand, organic search. If you don’t, in the Advanced Segments dialog, just call on the pipe character to keep your foods from mixing, if you have more than one brand keyword, e.g., mac|apple.

To learn everything you’ll ever want to know about how to create and utilize advanced segments, check out this video course from Google’s Conversion University.

With your advanced segment in place, you can set up your alert by clicking the This applies to drop-down menu and choosing your segment from Custom Segments. Next, click the Alert me when drop-down and choose Site Usage > Visits and the value you want to set as the threshold, e.g., % increases by more than 10 or % decreases by more than 10 — or whatever threshold you want to set.

Scenario 3: You manage PPC campaigns for your company, and you want to know when your revenue starts to dip.

You can set the Medium to Matches regular expression cpc|ppc and Revenue to % decrease by more than 10. The Compared to drop-down options will change depending on if you choose Day, Week, or Month from the Period drop-down due north.

Get More Ideas from Automatic Alerts

In addition to the custom alerts you can muster up, you should check out the plethora of automatic alerts Google Analytics provides you with (Intelligence > Daily/Weekly/Monthly Alerts). Monitoring these is a great way to get ideas for metrics and dimensions you may want to track.

Case in point, I discovered for one client — by looking at their monthly alerts with the Alert Sensitivity slider set in between Low and High to look at only those alerts with medium to high significance/impact — that their Goal 3 Conversions (their most important conversions, btw) were 500% higher than expected for the Returning Visitor dimension. If they wanted to continue to track that dimension, compare it to other dimensions, or investigate other metrics to figure out why it suddenly became the cool kid, all they’d have to do is click Create Segment to the right. That will create an advanced segment on the fly.

But Wait, There’s MORE

I just pulled examples based on common challenges I’ve helped clients work through. But there are obviously so many more uses for alerts. Here are just a few:

• If you have a couple keywords that are your site’s cash cow, you could create an alert for when traffic for those keywords has dropped, bounce rate has spiked, or conversions have dipped. If you want to just look at paid or organic, you’ll need to first set up a segment because you don’t have the option to set Medium and Keyword in alerts like you do Advanced Segments. (Yes, I could sell Advanced Segments door to door.)
• If you’re doing link building and are paying top dollar to be on a high PageRank site, you could set an alert for when visits from that site decrease below a particular threshold (Source > Matches exactly > [site]). When you start typing in the site name, GA will auto-complete for you. Or you can choose from the Value drop-down menu. If it drops, you might want to make sure the site hasn’t removed the link or relegated you to a sidebar or footer, scoundrels that some of them are.
• If you have a blog, you could set up a daily alert for traffic spikes to your blog. You’ll want to make sure you have a segment created for your blog traffic (Page > Starts with > /blog/). But even if you don’t have that segment created (tsk tsk), you could still create the alert. (Page > Starts with > /blog/ or whatever your blog starts with. Or if your blog isn’t in the root, you could choose Contains instead of Starts with and then enter your blog directory.)
• If you depend on mobile traffic, you could set up alerts for mobile visitors with the metrics you want to monitor (Visitors > Mobile > Matches exactly > Yes).
• If you have a local business, you could monitor your visits from your surrounding area. Again, it’s best to do this with a segment and then include that segment in the alert. But you could also just list your surrounding cities here (City > Matches regular expression > tampa|st. petersburg|clearwater|monkey’s eyebrow). Oh wait. Monkey’s Eyebrow is in Kentucky. Ma bad.
• If you have let’s say a product directory with a host of landing pages, you could create an alert for the landing pages in that directory and monitor the metrics of your choosing (Landing Page > Contains or Starts with > /[directory-name]/).

Now it’s your turn. Can you think of a creative use for alerts? If so, share it with us in the comments or shout it out to us on Twitter (@blueglassinc). Better yet, include me in your tweet (@AnnieCushing).