Ok. So, Intelligence is the new and exciting feature of Google Analytics. Fundamentally, the Google Analytics system has been updated so that it alerts us to any spikes, dips and anomolies beyond the norm of visitors to our site within its interface and by email (if requested). But, what exactly can we do with this data? Well in my mind, I feel that it is a fantastic way to monitor cause and effect on your site. Principally, in this post, I want to look at SEO and thus ‘traffic sources’ and how we can monitor the effect of changes in our carefully crafted SEO campaigns for the positive or negative.
How to Prep?
Firstly, decide upon the key terms that you want to watch e.g. scrambled eggs. Assume that ‘scrambled eggs’ is currently 2nd position in SERPS. We will assume that when it reaches 1st position, the visits to the site based on the traffic source, ‘scrambled eggs’ will boost.
Secondly, look at the current traffic stats for the key term, ‘scrambled eggs’ and decide what you feel would make a useful benchmark for the amount of visits e.g. per day are received due to the keyphrase ‘scrambled eggs’. In the below case, it is 7 visits/day.
Thirdly, you are about to set up an alert but this one should be set up in a profile filtered to only contain organic traffic.
Filter Profile to include only Organic Traffic
What Comes Next?
I know that e.g. today I added a link on site example.com with the anchor text, ‘scrambled eggs’ hyperlinked to my clients site. If the site bombs out of SERPS after today, it could be due to this and I want to know about it! Same for if traffic increases.
1. I am going to set 10 or more keywords a day as a positive key performance indicator as this is at least the number of visits I want to achieve for my Client on this term.
2. I am going to set 4 or less keywords a day as a negative key performance indicator as this will indicate a significant drop in traffic for my Client for this key term.
a. Hit your ‘intelligence’ tab within your Google Analytics package.
b. Hit ‘Create your alert’.
Then create your alert as follows (if you tick yes to the email, you will be notified via email of any changes):
Create your alert
Now, when you login to Google Analytics, you will see a list of alerts (auto-generated by Google Analytics and the custom alerts that you have created) that you can then analyse and react to accordingly.
Hope that helps!
Nikki Rae
Great guide Nikki – I’m looking forward to getting stuck into these new GA features, this one especially.
I wonder if you could hack together Yoast’s excellent SEO rankings tracker method so you could get alerts when a particular keyword reaches page 1 or even page 2… – now THAT would kick arse!
Let me have a think about that one….
Nikki