A couple of days ago, I received this email from
Google Analytics.
It's an intelligence alert notifying me that the page
loading time for mobile visitors to my site has an
unusual spike.
And this is a feature of Google Analytics, that I don't
think many people know about.
And, in fact, you can use it to monitor your web
performance metrics, which is really cool.
So I figured I'd give you guys a quick overview.
So, first of all, let's start at the beginning.
That's always a good place to start.
We're looking at Google Analytics, so
we just logged in.
This is your regular report.
This is specific to my site, so this is [INAUDIBLE]
dot com.
So let's find intelligence reports.
For that, you need to click into home, and you have this
section here called Intelligence Events, so let's
go to that overview, and what you'll see here is that Google
Analytics creates a number of automatic alerts for things
like number of page views, of visits, bounce rates, and a
few other things.
You can see that there are some alerts that are firing
here already.
But the real power of this functionality here is that you
can actually customize it to any metric
within Google Analytics.
And as you may know, Google Analytics tracks web
performance metrics through navigation timing, which means
that we can also set up alerts and get notifications for
things like page loading times, response times, DNS,
and many other things.
So in fact, that's exactly what I did.
That's why I got that alert.
So I have a couple of custom alerts set up in my account.
One is called--
One is specifically tracking mobile and the other one is
just a generic page loading time difference.
So these are actual alerts that have fired over the past
couple of days.
So let's take a look at one of them.
We have this PLT, stands for page load time, so I'm going
to click on the details section for
this guy right here.
And what you can see here is the actual alert.
So this graph here shows you the average page load time.
It's across all of my visitors for all of my pages, and on
November 23, there's little kind of bump right here, and
this actually triggered an alert.
And the best part about Google Analytics is not that it just
detected that there's this little bump here, but it
actually tries to infer as to what are the contributors to
this bump right here.
And what it figured out was that the major contributors
are likely from India, from city of Chennai.
And, in fact, it's looking at the metrics for those segments
and it's saying, look, on average, same day in the
previous week, the page load time was about 10 seconds, for
whatever reason it's 30 seconds.
That's not good.
For this specific city, the page load time spiked from
seven to 90 seconds.
That's terrible.
Something is terribly wrong there.
So not only that, but you can also click on these things
right here, it will reload the graph and show you the page
load time for this specific segment.
So now we're looking at India, and as you can see the page
load time is semi-reasonable, six, seven seconds, but ever
once in a while we get these spikes, 25 seconds, 25, and in
this case, 32 seconds.
So there's something systematic going wrong here,
and I don't know exactly what it is.
I need to track it down.
We can also drill into the specific cities and look at
the same graph.
And, in fact, you can see that this is a second occurrence of
the same event.
So this happened earlier and I didn't catch this.
So this is where having an alert is very, very useful.
First, you'll know that something
anomalous has happened.
I wouldn't have detected this otherwise, and two, it can
actually help you figure out what is the
cause of the problem.
So with that, let's actually take a look at how you would
go about setting up one of these custom alerts.
So let's close that, and we can go into
manage custom alerts.
Create an alert.
And let's create an alert, I don't know, let's track Japan.
Actually, you know what?
We're going to look at all traffic,
we're looking for country.
So we're going to look at country and territory, matches
exactly, Japan.
That's what we want.
And so here we're defining what segment of the traffic
that we want this alert to apply to.
Then we need to specify the actual metric, which is going
to be used to track the alert.
So in this case, we actually have a number of navigation
time metrics that we're tracking Google Analytics.
So we can look at things like response time, so this is your
server response.
So, for whatever reason, if your server starts responding
slowly to specific visitors, you can flag that here.
I'm going to look at page load time.
So this is the average page load time, and I'm going to
trigger this if it increases by more than,
let's say, 30% on--
you can do on a previous day, previous year, or previous
week, so in my earlier alert, I just used the previous week,
but let's create this one right here.
So that's it.
We can save the alert and Google Analytics will
automatically monitor and notify you.
And you can apply this against multiple profiles, here I'm
just specifying one site.
You can specify the period as well, so this is for how far
back should the alerts look at to detect these anomalies?
So it should be a day, a week, or perhaps, even a month.
So that's a very quick introduction, but there's
actually much, much more.
And to understand the power of what this gives you, you
really have to familiarize yourself with advanced
segments of Google Analytics.
So let's cancel out of this, and let's head back into our
standard reports.
And let's actually look at the site speed reports, which is
using navigation timing to track all
the performance data.
So here's our little spike that we
were looking at earlier.
And let's say, we want to compare this against desktop
or maybe mobile traffic.
So you can click on bad segments and Google Analytics
gives you, by default, a number of segments.
So mobile is one, and I can compare this to, let's say,
all visits.
Let's hit Apply.
And it will provide us with two segments, so now you can
see that the orange line here is the all visits and the blue
line is the mobile traffic.
So mobile's doing pretty well.
There's two spikes, but then look at this, the desktop or
the averages for all of my visits are fine, but mobile
specifically, is what's spiking.
So this already gives me a way to figure out, is it mobile
visitors or somebody else that's contributing to this
spike right here.
But that's kind of cool, but the real power in the story
here is the fact they can define your own segments.
So let's do exactly that.
We'll create a new segment, and we can, once again, we
have access to all the Google Analytics variables, so we can
say continents.
Let's look at Asia.
We can add an or statement so we can look at Asia or Europe.
Let's add another one, so continent again.
Let's see, or let's do North America perhaps.
Not coming up right now.
Well, you can define multiple continents or any multiple
metrics, and you can also end, so there's an or statement and
an end statement.
So we can filter down the specific segment that we're
looking for.
So let's add an end statement in here.
So you can look at the hundreds of different
variables that are in here, and you have access both to
the dimensions and individual metrics.
So there's things like if you have defined goals or revenue
conversions, you can actually track that here.
So you can say, look, I'm concerned about visitors that
come from Asia that are purchasing stuff on my site.
But you also have all of the page loading time metrics and
all the rest.
So lots and lots of flexibility here.
And the cool part is once you define the segment, so I'll
show you a couple of segments that I defined previously.
For example, I have visitors from Japan that are coming on
a desktop browser.
And if I apply that, that's what we're
looking at are here.
Now, now that we've defined the segment, we can actually
head back into Home, Intelligence Events, and when
we're defining a new custom alert, now you
can use this segment.
So instead of just saying all traffic, you have this tab
here called custom segments.
You can open this up, and you have all of the segments that
you defined previously.
So, for example, visitors from San Francisco
coming on mobile phone.
That's something that I've defined specifically for my
site, but you could have created a different segment,
which is related to registered users that have purchased
something on your site in the last 30 days, for example.
And that you want an alert if one of those users' page load
time is greater than 10 seconds, and that's it.
You save this alert, and you would get, if something bad
happens, you would get an alert like this.
You can go into Google Analytics and figure out
what's going on, which is pretty awesome.