With everything going on in your company it is important to stay up to date with trends in your data. However, it is impossible to check your analytics tool manually 24/7.
That’s why it is essential to have an automatic alert system set up.
Let’s imagine you are relaunching your website and need to check many different angles, you would want to be notified if one of your KPIs declined drastically, right? This is why we are introducing alerts in Google Analytics to you right now.
What are Google Analytics alerts?
Through Google Analytics Alerts, you are automatically notified whenever certain changes to your data happen, without having to log into the web analytics tool. Based on predetermined thresholds that you define and customize, custom alerts can be sent to you by email when there is a significant change or fluctuation in your data. By providing multiple email addresses, multiple alerts can run simultaneously to notify stakeholders.
Which alerts make sense for your data?
The alerts that you need to to set up depend on your company and what your goals are. Generally speaking, it makes sense to start off with a basic set of alerts which you can refine along the way.
KPIs which are almost always of interest are sessions, pageviews and the bounce rate. Subsequent KPIs depend on your business. For example, if you have a website which features a lot of videos and you are interested in tracking these, it makes sense to add an alert for your video plays. This way you always know what is going on with your most important KPIs.
Probably, one of the most important alerts to set up will let you know if the analytics tool has stopped tracking completely.
Which tools provide an automatic alerts setup?
Many tools, such as Google Analytics and Piano Analytics (formerly AT Internet), have an inbuilt function that allows you to set up alerts quickly and easily. If you are not using an analytics tool with an inbuilt alerts function, there is usually a possibility to set up alerts one way or another.
By default in Google Analytics it is possible to get notified via email or within Google Analytics itself. There are other cool integrations possible such as getting those alerts in Slack for example.
Can you create alerts in Google Analytics 4?
Alerts in GA4 are called insights. There are two options:
Automated insights: By default, GA4 is able to generate automated insights using a machine learning algorithm when unusual changes are detected in that data, such as sudden spikes or dips in your data.
Custom insights: If you need different or more specific information you can also create your own custom insights, where you can put the exact conditions that you need without relying on an algorithm to create them for you.
Set up your own Analytics Monitoring
Analytics alerts are very helpful to quickly identify tracking issues or other significant changes in data and therefore increase reaction time. In the long run this improves data quality which will help you to make data-driven business decisions.
We have a defined set of Basic KPIs that we monitor for us and for our clients. Contact us if you would like to set up your own individual Analytics Monitoring.
