Google Analytics is a great tool! That said, you don’t want to spend all your time looking at metrics right? It’s fun, but it’s not productive to spend hours per week staring at them. To avoid this, you can set alerts so you can receive emails when something unusual happens that is worth your immediate attention. Google Analytics calls those intelligence events, we just call them alerts. You can set them in Google Analytics, but they’re not going to be in realtime (which can be the case if you use us; we support near real time alerts).
So, what is worth your attention? It depends, but here are the top alerts you probably set.
Traffic spikes
This is the number one use case for Metrics Watch for many of our customers. Receive an email as soon as you have some unusual numbers. You know that you have roughly X visitors per day, but you probably want to know when that number doubles or even triple, right? Maybe you’ve been mentioned on a highly visited website? That’s great! React as soon as possible.
Traffic drop
Something could be wrong if your traffic from yesterday, or last week/month is under X visits, so add this alert to know when something is wrong. You don’t want that drop to stick, fix whatever caused it.
If you experience consistent traffic drops, you might want to consider this case study on how to grow organic visitors.
Spike in goal completion
You’ve setup some great and most of all, useful goals in Google Analytics? Awesome! Create an alert for every important goals (i.e., all of them). Don’t look at every numbers every hour to see if you’ve been mentioned on CNN or TechCrunch, just wait until we tell you that it’s worth looking at. You can set alerts for raw number of completion but there is more granularity possible, like the percentage that resulted in a conversions or the number of people who started conversion activity but didn’t complete it.
Drop in goal completion
The goals you have set in Google Analytics are important, and it’s crucial to know if something is badly configured or if you changed something that made the goal completion drop drastically.
Conversion rate drop
You might be expecting 10% of conversion, or 0.1%, it doesn’t matter, it depends on your business, but what matters, is that your conversion rate doesn’t drop under what you’re used to. What if you’re used to have a conversion rate of 3% and suddenly you are around 0.5%? You need to know! Again, the answer is: create an alert.
What matters to you?
We created Metrics Watch to avoid wasting hours on Google Analytics when in fact, many things are steady-ish or in predictable curves…but what happens when it’s not? You need to react fast. By settings alerts in Metrics Watch in near-real time, you don’t have to wait tomorrow to know something unusual happened today, make sure you know about it as soon as possible without wasting time staring at a dashboard.