Analytics is a must have for any digital marketing initiative. You can use most of the data provided by your analytics to enhance your marketing strategies and to gauge the response and success that your initiative has achieved.
No one can analyze all the data provided by their analytics every day. If you are a digital marketing expert, you will agree that checking through all the long lists of data is time-consuming and can sometimes be difficult to get to everything. Doing this everyday can compromise your attention you could be giving to other things. If you are on holiday or not at work, will you still be able to track the most important statistics regarding your website or blog?
Google analytics provides alerts about your data that allows you to stay on top of what is happening even when you are away from your computer. This is great way to analyze the data when you are on the move. Google analytics alerts is very easy to set up and you can find it in your profile settings. There are only 5 things when you want to set up a new Analytics alert:
Setting up a new Google alert
- Choose a profile where you want to create the new alert.
- Select the frequency at which you want to be alerted. You can change this later on.
- Identify a particular segment of visitors that you want to target. This is useful as you can include visitors from a specific demographic.
- Choose the metrics you want to monitor.
Here’s a couple of Google Alerts that I have setup.
Traffic drop: If your website generally receives a consistent amount of visitors every week, you can set up an alert that if the visitor count drops below 10% (example), it should alert you. This alert will give you a good indication if everything is running 100%.
No data: This alert will trigger when the given metric drops to zero. There are many metrics monitored on a monthly basis, but what if there’s a problem because you are not getting any data regarding a specific metric. Obviously, you cannot wait a month to discover a problem and this alert will notify you in time.
Error pages: You can set up an alert if any of your pages are generating errors for your visitors. This alert will help you identify errors that can influence sales, conversions, etc.
I have setup a few Google Analytics alerts but i must admit that it is a feature that I don’t use too often. I should start to use it more often as it is a powerful feature of Google Analytics.
Hi Anton,
I see you also specialize in ORM. I thought you might be interested in a service we have developed which is somewhat similar to Google Alerts. It is called InboundLinkAlerts and is based on the Google Analytics data for the site (so you must be using GA). This is a service which triggers an email alert to you once a new link to your site is discovered (based on Google Analytics). It is different than Google Alerts because it does not depend on crawling, but instead on newly added referral links found in Google Analytics. Often the service is much quicker in detection. You can learn more here:
http://www.embeddedanalytics.com/embedded-analytics-inboundlinkalerts.html
Thanks Mark. I will check it out.