4 Custom Google alerts you should be using

With Google Analytics, you can dive deep into data about your website and its visitors but sometimes you might overlook crucial changes to your data and miss out on opportunities to improve your site’s performance. Luckily, you can set up custom alerts so you’re instantly aware of fluctuations in performance!

You can set these alerts for a daily, weekly, or monthly period. For example, if you set an organic traffic alert for decreases in traffic, you can set that to trigger off a change in a day or in a month.

Of course, you’ll want to identify what KPIs are most important to your business and to get you started with that, we’ve outlined four custom alerts that we typically use for monitoring our clients’ websites’ performance. We break it down into two overall trends: Traffic and transactions. We’ve set our alerts up for atypical decreases or increases in traffic or transactions across four channels.

Custom alerts

All traffic

Traffic alert: This alert applies to all traffic coming to your website. Our condition is when sessions (website visits) is less than one per day. This is typically the only alert we set on the daily level as this lets us know if the site is down or Google Analytics is having issues connecting with your site.

Transaction alert: Similarly, we want to know if there’s a drop in transactions though setting this on a daily, weekly, or monthly parameter is based on your typical online booking performance. If you have a bigger property, it may be concerning if you don’t have a reservation coming through every day so maybe it makes sense to have this at the daily level. On the flip side, if you have a smaller property or higher average order value, you have a few days or a week where you don’t have an online reservation and you may want the parameter to be a month so your inbox isn’t overrun with unnecessary alerts.

Organic

Organic traffic: This alert is set for a period of a month where we get an alert when organic traffic decreases by more than 20% compared to the same month in the previous year. This alert shows us that our SEO may need some updates or perhaps our site’s been affected by an algorithm change or penalty.

Organic transactions: We also get alerted when organic transactions drop more than 20% compared to the same month in the previous year.

Paid

Paid traffic: Analytics will notify us when our paid traffic drops more than 20% compared to the same month in the year before. This is where we can get granular by selecting the medium of CPC (Cost Per Click) and seeing paid traffic as a whole or by selecting specific advertising platforms by choosing the medium (CPC) and the source (AdWords or Bing). This can help you identify any issues with your ad accounts and encourages you to revisit your ad copy, extensions, or landing pages.

Paid transactions: Notify us if paid transactions drop 20% this month compared to this month in the year prior.

Referral

Referral traffic: Google Analytics will alert us if referral traffic has decreased 20% compared to the same month in the previous year. This is another alert that you can be specific about if you want to track a particular referral source or costly directory listing.

Referral transactions: Notify us if referral transactions have dropped 20% in this month compared to the same time last year.