Intelligence has recently become much more intelligent

MoreVisibility - November 17, 2010

Two weeks ago, Google Analytics made an announcement at Ad Tech NYC that kind of fell under the radar and didn’t make for big headlines in the industry.

On our Analytics & Site Intelligence blog here at MoreVisibility, we’ve blogged in the past about the Intelligence report section in Google Analytics, and we’re big proponents of using the Intelligence data to understand the really important events that are happening on our website and our client’s websites. So, when Google announced the new Major Contributors feature, as well as SMS and Email alerts for the Intelligence report section, we were thrilled!

Previously, if any custom alert that you created “fired off” and displayed in your Intelligence report, all you would see is the name of your custom alert, the day, week, or month in which it occurred, and the comparison data to its right. Now, for any custom alert, you aren’t just shown the alert itself. You’re now shown the reasons why the alert was “fired off” and displayed in your report. These reasons are called Major Contributors, and you will see up to five reasons (or, contributing factors) as to why a custom alert is appearing in your Intelligence report.

Take a look at this example from our own Google Analytics account. We have a custom alert that lets us know when our AdWords conversion rate increases by a significant amount. With Major Contributors, I can now see the top five reasons why the alert is being displayed for this particular day, and also, their contribution to the increase in conversion rate:

You may have noticed that I have written the phrase “custom alert” several times now. Major Contributors are only available for custom alerts at this time – they’re not available for the standard, default alerts that you see everywhere in your Intelligence report.

Now, if you’re like me and you just can’t get enough alerts in your life, you can now have Google Analytics email you when a custom alert is triggered. Do you need to know about your custom alerts even faster than that? You can now also enter in your mobile phone number, and Google Analytics will send you a text message (U.S. only).

Finally, you can spread the love and set your custom alert up to email multiple recipients at the same time. If there are others in your company who will appreciate being alerted about an important event without even needing to log-in to Google Analytics, you can make their day by simply entering their Email addresses in when creating or editing your custom alert.