In today’s busy world, not everyone can check their analytics on a daily basis to ensure all is going well on the site. If your site is down…hopefully one of your loyal visitors will notify you, but that is not always the case. To help you monitor your website traffic to ensure nothing fishy is going on, Google has released Intelligence in Beta form within Google Analytics. Intelligence allows you to create custom alerts on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For example, if you want an alert when your site receives no visits on any particular day, you can create an alert that will send you an email notifying you of the situation. This will give you a slight jump on contacting your hosting provider before you lose too much traffic.
Google has also provided several alert templates that are very easy to copy/modify in your alert list. Some of these alert templates include:
- Total visits decreases by more than 50%
- Unique visitors decreases by more than 50%
- Average bounce rate increases by more than 50%
- Goal conversion rate decreases by more than 50%
In less drastic cases as mentioned in my previous example, many of these pre-made templates can be very useful. For example if you see a drastic change in a specific goal day-over-day, there may be something wrong with your checkout process, email sign-up sheet, etc. depending on your conversions. To make things even easier, Google has created automatic alerts that will send you alerts if atypical traffic patterns arise as long as you opt-in to receive these alerts.
This is a great free tool to use as an aid in monitoring your everyday web traffic and site usage. I have incurred any problems with intelligence, but remember it is still in Beta and should not be an excuse to completely ignore your metrics.
