First Look: Google Analytics Adds Intelligent Email Alerts & More!

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 by Andy Beal

First Look: Google Analytics Adds Intelligent Email Alerts & More!

When the Google Analytics team shared today’s new features with me, they wanted to walk me through all of the minor updates–before they revealed the big news.

I’m not going to do that to you!

You’re getting algorithmically driven, artificially intelligent, email alerts!

Andy, in English, please!

If Google Analytics detects a change in the data patterns of your site’s metrics it will send you an email alert to let you know. So, for example, let’s say your site gets to the homepage of Digg–and you were honestly unaware of it (yeah, right)–Google Analytics would send you an email alert to let you know “hey, you’re getting WAY more traffic from Digg than you normally get, hoss. You may want to come and investigate it.” OK, maybe not those exact words, but you get the idea.

Here’s a screenshot of the new dashboard:

Even better, you can set up your own custom alerts. So if you want to know when your conversion rate from visitors from California drops below 2%, you can set that up! Cool huh?

Now the not so cool.

The data is not yet “real time” but Amy Chang, Group Product Manager for Google Analytics, tells us to “stay tuned” on that. Also not so cool, Google Analytics is not smart enough to realize that you’ve set up a custom alert–so if your custom alert is similar to what Google has intelligently identified, you may end up getting two alerts. Lastly, no SMS alerts–at least “not yet.” Though with Google Voice rolling out to more folks, I suspect SMS alerts are not too far behind.

OK, so what other cool eye-candy is the Google Analytics fairy handing out today? Here’s a quick summary:

More custom goals! You can now have up to 20 goals per profile–up from the previous limit of 4.
Two new goal types: Time on Site and Pages per Visit. Perfect for those that wish to measure engagement and branding success rates!
Mobile access measurement. Add a new server side snippet to your mobile website and Google Analytics will make all your mobile metric dreams come true!
Lots more tweaks.

Personally, I’m just plain giddy to get the analytics alerts. Now I don’t have to worry about checking in on my sites to see if there’s “anything out of the ordinary” going on. Google will let me know if something’s up.

Now, if we could just get to real-time alerts, I can sleep at night knowing that, if Marketing Pilgrim is nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Google Analytics will alert me to the surge in traffic.

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9 comments on “First Look: Google Analytics Adds Intelligent Email Alerts & More!”

Chris Korhonen Says:

October 20th, 2009 at 2:43 pm

Very nice. Any indication of when these will be released? I’m not seeing them in my GA account yet.
Chris Korhonen´s last blog ..ckorhonen: Loving the sound of Google Analytics new additions: additional goals, intelligent email alerts and more: http://bit.ly/3MLqSo

Andy Beal Reply:
October 20th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I believe Avinash Kaushik is on stage making the announcement, so I would expect it to go live soon.
Jaan Kanellis Says:

October 20th, 2009 at 4:17 pm

Love to start playing with it in my accounts!
Jaan Kanellis´s last blog ..Jaan Got Married!
Luci Says:

October 21st, 2009 at 4:03 am

Brilliant, shame about the possible double-alerts, but two e-mails are better than none, I guess. Is there a time-scale for when it’s going to be in real-time?
Soon, Google Rolls Out Intelligent Email Alerts For Google Analytics Says:

October 21st, 2009 at 5:06 am

[...] Real time alert probably is in the work, but as of now real time alert is not yet available. Source. Share and [...]
Aaron Says:

October 21st, 2009 at 2:07 pm

Wow andy.. Thanks for posting this.. The alerts can be especially useful for monitoring traffic spikes or sudden goal conversions. Kudos to Google for listening to requests and implementing functionality that can be very helpful to all of us marketers and webmasters.
Aaron´s last blog ..Top List of DoFollow Blogs with mozRank
Bloggers Digest: October 2009 | Pinnacle Business Academy Says:

October 30th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

[...] been busy this month with updates to Google Analytics features, covered by Marketing Pilgrim, VKI Studios and Marketing [...]
Os Melhores Artigos de SEO da Semana – Edição 5 « black mestreSEO Says:

November 4th, 2009 at 8:21 am

[...] First Look: Google Analytics Adds Intelligent Email Alerts & More! publicado em 20/10/2009 Noticiamos aqui na MestreSEO que o Google disponibilizou para alguns usuários mais um novo recurso, a guia “intelligence”, que possibilita o envio automático de email quando seu site se comporta de maneira incomum. Estes alertas podem ser configurados individualmente e ajudarão os webmasters a monitorarem os dados que recebem dos seus websites. [...]
Francis Teo Says:

November 12th, 2009 at 10:45 am

This is something I could really use.
Still waiting for the feature to appear in my analytics account.

Any idea when it will be rolled out live? By the looks of it seems to be about a month since it was announced.

I know I know… I’m impatient
Francis Teo´s last blog ..4 Questions To Ask Your SEO Firm

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