- In this video I'm gonna show you
how you can avoid expensive mistakes
with the help of Google Analytics custom alerts
to get notified once your website breaks.
All and more coming up, so let's dive in.
(funky music)
Hi there, and welcome to another video of measureschool.com,
where we teach you the data driven way of digital marketing.
My name is Julian, and today we're going to talk about
Google Analytics custom alerts.
So today we're going to talk about
these Google Analytics alerts
that you can request to be sent out
once specific metrics on your page reach certain thresholds.
And these can be really useful to avoid expensive mistakes.
From personal experience I can say it's really annoying
if you find out after a week or two
that maybe your checkout is broken
or you haven't collected any email addresses
because your sign up didn't work.
Obviously regular testing will help in these cases,
but what if you're a solo pro now, like myself,
and just want to make sure
that your website is working correctly?
So we can put some intelligent alerts in place
that send out these emails or send us a text message
once a certain threshold is reached.
Let's see how we can set them up.
Within Google Analytics we can go through
the right profile and in the admin section,
under the view settings, we have custom alerts available.
Now these are under personal tools and assets,
which means they are individual
to your Google Analytics login.
But as we will see,
you can also alert other people to get the emails.
Let's go over to custom alerts here
and we can find a overview of our custom alerts.
We don't have anything setup right here.
Now we click here on new alert, and we can give it a name.
I would always make it very descriptive,
so once a user gets this email,
knows exactly what is up and what to check out.
For example, checkout broken.
And then add more descriptive description
of the actual condition, so in our case
we will write transaction decreased by more than 90%.
In the next step you can choose the profile
that you want to run this on.
We are here in our master profile, which is fine,
so I will leave it at the master profile.
And then the period to run this analysis on
and determine the threshold,
so we have day, week, and month available
depending on how many conversions you get per day
or per month, it might be useful to change this.
And then you can select if you want to send this
as an email alert and select the email addresses
that you want to send this alert to.
Alternatively you could also set up
a mobile phone to send a text message right to your phone,
which is only available in the United States.
And last we'll look at the alert conditions.
I'll give you some best practices.
First you can choose the traffic source,
so you can actually segment down to, for example,
the source level if you only want to run an alert
on the SEO traffic if you are, for example,
responsible for the SEO traffic,
then that might be an option to consider.
So we have our different dimensions available here
and can choose to filter down our traffic
to only run this alert on certain segments,
but I will go with all traffic here.
And then we define the condition,
in our case alert me when the sessions,
in our case it would be transactions
because we have e-commerce tracking installed,
is less than if you have specific value in mind
you might want to punch that in here,
but a more generic version would be to go with
the percentage decrease by more than, let's put in 90%,
which will then be compared
to the same day in the previous week
or in the previous year, and so on.
I will go with the previous day option
and then we can save the alert.
And that's how you set up a basic custom alert
within Google Analytics to avoid these mistakes.
You get an email sent out once your transaction
decrease by more than 90% compared to the previous day.
Obviously there's many more alerts that you can put in here.
Just as an example, can go back into our report here
and I would recommend
to actually check your important goals.
For example, on measure score we have a sign up goal
for our email subscribers,
but also for our membership sign ups,
which I would put into place the same way as we did before.
Another example would be a more general one
that we could put in place, for example,
an average time on site alert,
which triggers at a decrease of 50% or more.
Again, we choose our master profile,
the period, and then select the email addresses,
which are now saved.
We can look at our all traffic report
and we'll trigger this on the average session duration,
which should trigger when it's decreased
by more than 50% compared to the previous day.
And if you get this alert sent out,
this might either mean that there's a technical issue
on your website, maybe there's an issue
with the site loading and people don't hang around
as long anymore, or you've got a lot of irrelevant traffic
where the user only stays for a few seconds
and leaves the website again.
So this is a great general alert to be notified
if there's anything wrong on your website.
Now be aware, once you get these alerts sent out
to investigate within your Google Analytics
why it actually triggered.
For the checkout broken analysis
you would actually look at your transaction
and see how many transactions were triggered
in the last 24 hours.
And maybe then you will be able to figure out
if this alert is actually correct,
and go back to your website to analyse
where the mistake happened,
and if there's something you need to fix.
But obviously there could also be false negatives here.
For example, you did a sale on one day
and next day the sale ended,
and the actual transactions decreased by 90%,
which then puts it back to a normal level
and over the next few days
you wouldn't get these alerts any more.
So always be aware of the context
and a great tool to give your data more context,
let's zoom out here a bit,
is actually the annotation tool,
which you'll find under your chart here
where you can input automations.
Well that's something we're going to discuss
in another video.
And that's already it with
this week's video of measureschool.com.
If you want to find out more about custom alerts,
then check out our resource at measureschool.com/alerts.
And if you like this video,
please give us a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel
so we can bring you more awesome videos every week.
My name is Julian, 'til next time.
(funky music)