Google Analytics is one of my favorite toys! If you’re a blogger and you’re not using it, sign up today and start collecting data about how visitors interact with your blog. Alongside the myriad useful default reports, there are a stack of other tools to help you understand your blog’s activity. One such feature is Google Analytics Alerts… the subject of this post.
What Are Google Analytics Alerts?
Google Analytics offers many powerful tools to enhance the default reports most people use to understand how their blogs perform. Google Analytics custom alerts is one such function that’s seriously underused… even by those who consider themselves hardcore GA fanatics.
In layman’s terms, custom alerts provide a way for you to monitor your blog without having to check manually. You create an alert to look for a specific signal or metric, which triggers a notification if it is met. For example, you might create an alert that tells you if your blog receives 0 visits. You might create another if your bounce rate increases above what you’d consider normal.
As such, Google Analytics alerts can let you know if there’s a particular problem you should look at.
But alerts do not necessarily need to be problem-based because you can create them if to monitor milestones, such as:
- Visitor growth.
- New visitor percentage increases.
- Orders and revenue (if you sell products and use conversion tracking).
You can configure Google Analytics alerts to send you daily, weekly or monthly notifications. This is great if you have to step away from GA for a while, but still want to know about specific performance issues or target milestones. To be honest they’re great anyway since it’s more efficient to let GA notify you about things rather than checking manually.
How to Set Up Custom Alerts in GA
You create custom alerts from your Google Analytics Customisation menu by clicking, erm, Custom Alerts!
In the image above you can see this opens up an option to view any existing custom alert you’ve created, modify them or create new ones. You do this by clicking the “Manage custom alerts” button… which takes you to the following screen.
In the screenshot example above you can see an option to create a new alert ( the “+ New Alert button). You create a new Google Analytics alert by clicking this, after which you’ll see the following screen.
From here it’s simply a case of:
- Providing a name for your alert.
- Setting the alert period (day, week, month).
- Selecting whether or not you want en email notification if the alert triggers.
- Adding your conditions.
- Clicking save when your done!
Pretty simple right? It is… but you can set up some pretty slick and complex alerts.
Find out how to create a custom alert for broken links in Google Analytics.
Summary
- Google Analytics Alerts are a means for you to monitor events on your blog. These may be negative (i.e. no visitors, indicating a reporting or site problem) or positive (week on week growth).
- Custom alerts provide you with a mechanism to find out about issues at the earliest opportunity, without you having to manually look for them.
- Alerts can update you of events or engagements if you do not have access to Google Analytics for any length of time, such as holidays, out of office, technical problems etc.
That’s it for now.
Paul
Do you use Google Analytics alerts? Leave a comment below and tell me about it.
Hi Paul, this is a very clear guide on how to set up alerts in GA! I’m honestly addicted to checking my GA stats manually, which is why I’ve never considered them. Even though I knew that alerts exist I never pushed myself to figure them out. This guide was the perfect timing for me, thank you! I’m gonna set up the broken link alert first, I think this one is pretty much mandatory for any blogger. Cheers, James
Hi James. I’m glad you found this useful. GA can be extremely addictive and I find alerts help me resist refreshing it every two minutes!