Why creating Google Analytics alerts is a very smart idea

With digital marketing and growth hacking, measuring what you are doing is an absolute must. If you are starting with digital marketing or have been running various campaigns for years, it’s vital to know that effective measurement is key to determine what is working and what should change or even be dropped completely.

If you are using Google Analytics, you can use most of the data provided by Google Analytics to enhance your marketing strategies and to gauge the response and success that your initiative has achieved.

Analysing analytics can be time consuming

No one can analyse all the data provided by Google Analytics every day. Yes you can setup custom reports or view the analytics with with an app on your smartphone or tablet, but it can be time consuming and sometimes difficult to check on everything. Doing this everyday can compromise your attention you could be giving to other things. If you are on holiday or not at work, will you still be able to track the most important statistics regarding your website, blog or ecommerce store?

This is where Google Analytics alerts come to the rescue.

Google Analytics provides alerts about your data that allows you to stay on top of what is happening even when you are away from your computer. This is great way to analyze the data when you are on the move. Google analytics alerts is very easy to set up and you can find it in your profile settings. There are only 5 things when you want to set up a new Analytics alert:

Setting up a new Google alert

• Choose a profile where you want to create the new alert.
• Select the frequency at which you want to be alerted. You can change this later on.
• Identify a particular segment of visitors that you want to target. This is useful as you can include visitors from a specific demographic.
• Choose the metrics you want to monitor.

Here are a couple of Google Alerts that I have setup.

• Traffic drop: If your website generally receives a consistent amount of visitors every week, you can set up an alert that if the visitor count drops below 10% (example), it should alert you. This alert will give you a good indication if everything is running 100%.
• No data: This alert will trigger when the given metric drops to zero. There are many metrics monitored on a monthly basis, but what if there’s a problem because you are not getting any data regarding a specific metric. Obviously, you cannot wait a month to discover a problem and this alert will notify you in time.
• Error pages:  You can set up an alert if any of your pages are generating errors for your visitors. This alert will help you identify errors that can influence sales, conversions, etc. This alert is especially useful for ecommerce and other large website using various tracking methods.

Being alerted before something goes completely haywire with your digital marketing strategy can be crucial to the success of your campaign.