Major New Features Added To Intelligence

Today at Ad Tech NYC, we announced a few major new features in your Intelligence reports which should be very useful: Major Contributors for Custom Alerts, and SMS and Email alerts.

Major Contributors

When you have a custom alert set up to capture important changes in your account, you can now see a break down of the individual segments that are the most likely instigators of the change in traffic. For example, in the below screenshot we can see that on June 4, visits to the GoogleStore are up 510%. That alert was triggered because we set up a Custom Alert for "Visits Up By 10%".

(click to enlarge)

Now, as you can see underneath that Custom Alert there is a new sub-section called “Major Contributors.” When Google Analytics detects causes to a major change in traffic, this section will display up to 5 segments that have contributed to that particular change.

In this case, we see the source “gmail.blogspot.com” is sending new traffic to a particular landing page. You can click on the url of the referrer or landing page to view the path your users took to arrive at your site. It turns out that an article posted to the gmail blog is sending heavy traffic to the gmail sweatshirts on the GoogleStore. Digging in further, we also discover that it has resulted in an increase of 10 times the revenue for that day, which we can now attribute to a known cause thanks to this major contributor section.

That's Major Contributors!

In order to use it, create a custom alert. Here's an image of the "Manage Intelligence Alerts" area in your reports:

And here's a help center article on examples of useful custom alerts, and you can also use the alert templates, pictured here, to quickly create custom alerts:

SMS and Email

Also, when a custom alerts is triggered, you can now opt in to be notified by SMS (US only) or send alerts to your colleagues with multiple email recipients.

This is a practical feature when you've set up important alerts such as traffic or conversions down by 50%, for example. That's info you or someone in your organization should know ASAP, wherever you are.

And, as a reminder, you can get alerts on GA's full suite of metrics, including all 20 GA goals, Adwords metrics like CTR and content metrics like time on page.

This latest version of alerts with major contributors is a first for the analytics industry anywhere. We hope you enjoy it, and use it to take action quickly.

Posted by Beth Liebert, Google Analytics Team