It\u2019s no secret that everyone in our online marketing team is a major Google Analytics fan \u2013 and the fact that I spend more time with GA than I do with some of my closest family is worrying to say the least! So when we get new features to play around with, we all get very excited.<\/p>\n
The new Google Intelligence feature looks, at first glance, to be intriguing. The automatic alerts pick out traffic jumps, conversion rate drops, and any other unusual website behaviour that you might otherwise miss. Intelligence has great potential, and will be an absolutely vital tool in the future for pinpointing unusual trends.<\/p>\n
That said, the number of useful automatic alerts compared to the number of total alerts is low (I\u2019m not sure that knowing the average time Manchester users spent on site today increased by 10% is going to help me all too much). Google has obviously realised this though and have done something to help you combat it. Each alert is given a \u2018significance\u2019, and there is a nice \u2018alert sensitivity slider\u2019 which allows you to specify how important an alert needs to be to be shown.<\/p>\n
Where this tool will really come into its own in the future is via its custom alerts feature. This allows you to specify a traffic source or medium, and set a metric for the system to watch. For example, we get GA to alert us if revenue from Google drops by 50% day by day.<\/p>\n
The problem we have with this at the moment though (and the reason I highlighted how great this tool will be in the future) is that you\u2019re only allowed to choose one dimension, and one metric per alert.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s say we\u2019re running a PPC campaign on a fixed budget using Adwords, and want to know when the campaign switches itself off. We go to create a custom alert, and we specify that this applies to traffic where: \u201csource is Google\u201d and \u201cmedium is CPC\u201d. Oh, wait… can\u2019t do that! I can pick either \u201csource is Google\u201d OR \u201cmedium is CPC\u201d.<\/p>\n
Obviously there are ways around this \u2013 we could create a Google CPC-only filtered profile and add the alert on there, but that\u2019s not the point. For this tool to reach its potential we need to be able to specify more conditions in each alert.<\/p>\n
Something else that\u2019s missing is the ability to tie alerts in with custom variables. Now that we have multiple custom variables, GA has more scope than ever before. But even better would be the ability to have alerts based on changes in your custom variables.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about what I would do with this extra functionality, and have a few alerts that would be great to have running.\n<\/p>\n