Google Analytics’ Custom Alerts feature lets you create alerts based on conditions you specify. For example, you can set an alert for when the number of website visitors to a landing page on your website increases by 200% day-over-day. Setting up and receiving alerts helps you become aware of website irregularities. While there’s a wide range of custom alerts you can set up, you can start with the following six Google Analytics Custom Alerts.

1. No Daily Data

   You can set up Google Analytics custom alert to track complete inactivity on your website. If you typically generate a few hundreds or thousands website visitors daily and you don’t receive any traffic all of a sudden, there’s something wrong with your Google Analytics code, or website. Take a look at your Google Analytics code or website and find out what needs to be remedied.

2. Spike in Bounce Rate

   You can create a Google Analytics custom alert when your website bounce rate exceeds or increases by a certain percentage compared to the previous day or the same day in the previous week. If the bounce rate exceeds a certain percentage of increases tremendously compared to the previous day out of the blue, there’s likely something wrong with your website. Perhaps your website isn’t loading properly or fast enough which has caused a large portion of your website visitors to bounce your website after landing on your site. To remedy this problem, take a look at your website and see if there are certain changes or issues on your website that may have caused the increased bounce rate and make changes accordingly.

3. Significant Drop Google Analytics Goal Conversions

   If you generate anywhere between 20 to 30 Google Analytics goal conversions daily and you’re down to only five goal conversions in one day, take a look at your digital ads campaigns or website and see if any inadvertent changes have been made that have led to a major drop in goal conversions. You can also take a look at the goal conversion process such as an eCommerce checkout and see if there are bugs which have led to the drop in Google Analytics goal conversion.

4. Significant Drop in Google Ads Traffic

   You can also use Google Analytics Custom Alerts to track a Google Ads campaign and see if it has any significant drops. You can track if a campaign’s traffic is dropping by a certain percentage compared to the previous day or the same day in the previous week. Tracking this information helps you find out if there are problems with your Google Ads campaign. For example, you may find out that your Google Ads campaign is paused. Gaining this information helps you react and remedy the problem quickly.

5. Significant Drop in Social Media Traffic

   Similar to tracking Google Ads campaign traffic, you can also keep an eye on your social media traffic and see if there’s been any significant drop in traffic. For example, you can track your Facebook traffic and see if there’s been any major drops in traffic in comparison to the previous day or the same day in the previous week. Setting a custom alert for your social media traffic allows you to respond to any issues with your social media channels or paid campaigns. For example, if you find out that your Facebook traffic has dropped by 50% compared to the day before because your Facebook Ads campaign is inactive, you can reactivate your Facebook Ads to continue to market to your target audiences.

6. Significant Increase in Page Load Time

   One of the most important Google Analytics custom alerts you should create is tracking page load time. A typical website should load within one to three seconds. Anything beyond that creates a negative user-experience. If your website takes over 10 seconds to load, there’s something wrong with your website or hosting company. To see if your website frequently experiences pagespeed issues, you can create a custom alert to track if it takes your website over three seconds to load and you can create another custom alert track if it takes your website over five or ten seconds to load. If you’re receiving several notifications a month stating that it’s taking your website over 10 seconds to load, take a look at your website and find opportunities to optimize your website speed or switch your hosting company.

If you have any questions about Google Analytics custom alerts or want help setting Google analytics custom alerts for your Google Analytics to ensure that you’re staying on top of drastic changes in your website behaviour, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help!