This month, Google launched Google Analytics Intelligence, a new tool for analysing website traffic metrics.
Google Analytics produces a multitude of data to sift through and, whilst it provides some great tools as to how traffic is behaving on your website, potentially revealing information can in theory be overlooked by an analyst monitoring multiple or complex websites.
Google Analytics Intelligence, in short, works as a virtual assistant, drawing site owners’ attention to deviations from overall trends in website traffic that may otherwise have been missed. For example, if the bounce rate on your website landing page suddenly shoots up above the normal deviation from the mean average, Google Analytics Intelligence will alert you.
Intelligence
The alerts to anomalies that Intelligence delivers provide some form of statistical analysis, rather than simply the presentation of raw data, and this is useful because it can draw your attention to something without the need for particularly sophisticated analysis.
Intelligence may draw attention to an anomaly that is negative and needs remedying; the bounce rate example previously mentioned, for instance, could indicate that someone within your organisation has inadvertently changed something on the landing page, causing traffic to navigate away immediately, and thanks to the alert you are able to remedy this quickly. Without the alert, this could have gone unnoticed, and been potentially detrimental to business. Intelligence may also reveal a new opportunity to take advantage of if data trends are reversed and there is a surge in visits.
Custom alerts
Google Analytics Intelligence also allows for the creation of your own bespoke Custom Alerts, for which you can specify which traffic type must reach (or not reach) a certain metric. This allows you to tailor results to the specific traffic you want to target, including traffic by region, ad campaign and referral path.
The Custom Alerts feature of Google Analytics Intelligence is particularly useful for tracking the performance of ad campaigns, both on and offline. For example, if you were running an offline campaign on billboards in a specific city, you could set Custom Alerts to tell you when traffic from that geographical location increased by a certain percentage, thus judging its effectiveness. Similarly, you can track when the campaign starts to wane in that area and traffic starts to die off.
Of course, geographical Custom Alerts are much less accurate here in the UK than in the US as it’s not easy to pinpoint a user’s exact location in this country; however this is an illustrative example.
Google Analytics Intelligence will deliver alerts to you by email, if you choose, and is being hailed as a time-saving tool, giving pointers to analysts as to what is important and what they should be looking at, therefore cutting down on the amount of sifting through myriads of data an analyst must do.
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