by samGoogle Analytics is a powerful tool for digital marketing. You can use the ocean of data that Analytics provides to design your marketing strategies and even use it to gauge the response of a strategy that you implemented.
No one can check the data every day. If you are an SEO expert, you would be in agreement that checking the long list of data can be very difficult and would compromise the attention that you should have given to other things. If you are on vacation, things can get even more difficult. The best part is that Google Analytics also provides alerts about your data that allow you to stay on top of your data even while you are on vacation. This allows you to implement a successful online marketing strategy and change it whenever the data is not going in its favour.
Alerts tool is very easy to set up. You can easily find it in profile settings. You would need to do five things to set up Google Analytics alerts:
- Choose a profile on which you wish to apply the alert
- Select the frequency at which you wish to monitor the data. You can later change the option according to your needs. For example, when you implement a new strategy, you will require daily alerts to measure the response.
- Identify the particular segment of visitors whom you wish to target. This can include visitors from a specified geographical region, etc.
- Choose the metrics you wish to monitor
- You can then set a threshold for alert. A particular increase or decrease in the metric (specified by the threshold) would activate the alert.
Here are some Google alerts that can be of great help:
- 10% Daily Traffic Drop: A site generally receives a consistent visitor count week over week. If the metric drops by more than 10%, it is a signal that something needs investigation. You can ignore this alert during the holiday season, some days post-holiday season, and others such periods where you would expect a drastic change in the metric. This alert will give you a signal when your digital marketing strategy goes awry.
- No data: This alert activates when the given metric drops to zero. Many metrics are monitored on a monthly basis, but what if there is a problem because of which you are not getting data regarding the metric? You obviously can’t wait for a month to discover the problem; this is when this alert kicks in.
- Daily error pages: Your content can develop technical glitches sometimes. You would like to monitor if one or more of your pages are generating errors for the visitors. You can have an alert to monitor any error. Take this report seriously, but do not overdo it. Websites can develop errors all the time and rushing after every error can be a very difficult task. The best you can do is to identify errors that can be damaging, correct them, and then move on.