Google Analytics has begun to roll out their new Analytics Intelligence feature, I was lucky enough to find it when I logged into Google Analytics this morning. The new feature alerts you, either via email if you se it up to or through the analytics interface, of any type of data change that you can think of on a daily, weekly or monthly timeframe, which means the data you’ll be looking at will go from the tactical to the strategic.

To make it even more useful the system preloads some alerts for you based on historical data, these are automatic alerts. This new feature from Google is also smart enough to know the difference between a change in your analytics data that is part of a larger trend and a change that is connected with a particular marketing promotion or other anomaly.

My advice to all web marketers is to dive into the historical alerts first and look for big spikes or dips with the Alert Sensitivity Slider. Move the slider all the way to low to see just the most significant alerts. This is an easy way to keep your head above the sea of data and get deep into your analytics quickly. Once your there you’ll need to start asking the tough why questions like why was there a greater than 500% spike in new visitors on that particular day? What did we do right? To get to the tough answers you’ll need to add your own intelligence and start connecting the dots with any changes you implemented on your site or in your marketing campaigns to correlate to those particular spikes or dips.

Here are some custom alerts you can set up to get you started:

1. When bounce rates for paid search is going up
2. When conversions on a daily basis are higher than normal
3. When the percentage of new visits is less than X
4. When your returning visitors are less than X
5. When your revenue decreases by more than X
6. Any significant changes in your goal data

Once you’re done with that take a break you deserve it, get a cup of coffee and when you’re ready to dive back in go back into the Intelligence tab and click on the Create Segment link to the right of your most significant alerts with the Alert Sensitivity Slider set all the way to Low. What you’ll be doing is creating custom segments on the fly based on significant changes on your site with which you’ll ask the tough questions again to do a possible causal analysis (what caused this?) to figure out if those changes are monatizable opportunities to your business. This will give you the context behind the data. Have fun with your data because this is only the beginning.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.