Automated intelligence alerts (and why you should be using them)

Whilst there are measures that can be taken to reduce “surprises” with your website, there are so many things that can potentially go wrong that it is impossible to ensure against everything.  Sometimes the best we can do is to make sure that we are made quickly aware of problems and are able to react.

One of my favourite tools to alert me of issues is a much-utilised feature in Google Analytics: Intelligence Events Custom Alerts. This easy-to-use feature allows you to set up criteria that you want to be notified about.

Setting up an intelligence event custom alert

Creating a custom alert takes about two minutes.  If you are a Google Analytics user and are not using custom alerts then try this now – it’s a great investment in time.  We’ll create an alert to email you if your website stops receiving visitors.

Custom Alerts can be found under “Intelligence Events” in the reporting view. Standard Intelligence Events are metrics that Google Analytics feels warrant flagging.  These are useful, but we’ll be using the Custom Alerts tag today.

Click on the Custom Alerts Tag tab then the Manage custom alerts button to see any that you have already created.  The red NEW ALERT button will allow you to create your own custom alert.

The new alert form has X fields you can use to create your alert:

Alert name: A label so that you can identify this alert later
Apply to: Which views you want this alert to be set up for (if you have multiple websites/views you can create a single alert to monitor them all)
Period: Choose whether this should run daily, weekly or monthly
Send me an email when this alert triggers: This will send an email to the email address on the account that you are logged into
Setup your mobile phone: Google Analytics can also send the alert to your mobile phone.  At the time of writing this feature was still only available for mobile numbers in the USA.
Alert conditions: this is where you define the criteria that will trigger the alert.  I’ve included examples of some that I find useful below.

Custom alert: No data (panic!)

Definitely have this as a daily alert to find out if either your site is down or analytics isn’t collecting your data correctly.

This applies to: All Traffic
Alert me when: Sessions / Is less than / 1

Custom alert: Traffic spike

Alerts don’t just have to be for bad stuff.  Knowing when traffic is spiking can allow you to capitalise on events.  Look back at your own historic data to see what sort of % increase is appropriate for your website.

This applies to: All Traffic
Alert me when: Sessions / increases by more than / 20% / Same day in the previous week

Custom alert: Traffic drop

The inverse of the spike.

This applies to: All Traffic
Alert me when: Sessions / decreases by more than / 20% / Same day in the previous week

Custom alert: Bounce Rate

Site updates can sometimes introduce a bug that sends bounce rates skyrocketing.  You can get a similar result by monitoring average visitor duration.

This applies to: All Traffic
Alert me when: Bounce Rate / increases by more than / 10% / Same day in the previous week

Custom alert: Drop in organic search traffic

Algorithm updates, errant robots.txt files or even manual penalties can cause sudden traffic drops and fast action can aid quick recovery.

This applies to: Medium / Matches exactly / organic
Alert me when: Sessions / decreases by more than / 20% / Same day in the previous week

Limitations and workarounds

As mentioned above, text alerts are only available to numbers in the USA.  Site owners outside of the USA can get around this by creating  new account with a dedicated address and monitoring that through a service like IFTTT https://ifttt.com/

Alerts are also limited to being run daily, which is a shame.  Some of the critical alerts would be great to get hourly or more, but this is not an option.

The number of metrics that can be monitored is also quite limited.  AdSense publishers in particular might also disappointed that they cannot directly monitor for fluctuation in CTR or ad impressions.  There is a work around for this involving some JavaScript trickery and event/goal tracking.