Do you check your Google Analytics account every day? Every week? Every month? I hope so on the last one but even if you are “checking in” on your analytics account, there’s a lot to look at so you might miss something. Also, I’m sure there are events that you want to know about immediately like maybe a 50% drop in traffic from one month to another or an increase in the bounce rate (measures visitors that exit from the page they land on without taking any action) of over 50%? Take the effective and automatic route by setting up Google Analytics Custom Alerts. These are especially effective if you’re monitoring many different websites.
The interface is pretty straight-forward to setup your own alerts but I’ll share some alerts that I use on some of my accounts. You can click on the name of the alerts below to add them directly to your analytics account. Yeah, that is pretty cool.
50% Traffic Drop
You probably want to know if your overall traffic drops by 50% in a month.
Sudden Traffic Spikes
Traffic increases by 25% week to week. This is a good thing!
40% Drop in Leads
40% drop in visitors to your site compared to last month.
Analytics has flatlined
Visitors dropped by 95% compared to last week. This could be an issue with analytics or an even bigger issue with your site.
Leads increased 50% or more
Visits increased by 50% compared to last month. This is good!
50% Drop in Referrals from Google
Visits drop by 50% compared to last week.
Direct Traffic Bounce Rate Over 70%
Your direct traffic bounce rate (number of people leaving from the same page they arrived on, i.e. no action) has increased by 70%. This is usually someone in the company that is visiting the site or maybe they set the home page of every computer to the website. If this happens, you need to exclude the IP address so you’re not skewing data.
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