Google Analytics gets intelligent

Do you check your analytics dashboard every day? Yeah, me neither. We all mean to do it. We know it’s important. But, real life – helping customers, dealing with employees, what-have-you – sometimes takes priority. That’s what makes Google’s new “Analytics Intelligence” and Analytics Alerts so handy.

Basically, the new features within Google Analytics allow you to define events – a big jump in traffic, or worse, a big decline – and receive alerts when those events occur. Here’s what they say about it on the Google Analytics blog:

• Analytics Intelligence: We’re launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.
• Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur

And here’s Google’s video that explains how to use them:

What do you think? Will Intelligence and Analytics Alerts help your business? Tell us about it in the comments.

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