Using custom alerts to track website targets

I’ve blogged before about Google Analytics and how the platform makes it easier to analyze your website traffic and use data to inform your content marketing strategy.

Custom alerts are an easy way to track website targets; they proactively let you know when certain things happen on your website.

When creating custom alerts, I recommend setting high thresholds for the alerts since you will receive an email each time the target is hit.

google alertFor example, you don’t want to create a custom alert for every time someone visits your blog because you’ll be constantly bombarded with emails notifying you that the action happened.

Below is a simple example of how to use custom alerts to notify you when important targets are reached:

Goal of alert: notify me when someone spends 5+ minutes on my blog

Steps to create the alert:

  1. Go to the admin section of your Google Analytics profile.
  2. Click Account > View > Custom Alerts.
  3. Hit “New alert” button to create a new alert.
  4. Create a descriptive name for the alert so that when you receive the email notifications, you immediately know what it means.
  5. Set the time period, the conditions and whether you want to be alerted via email.
    1. Note: you can set the period to be daily, weekly or monthly. Also, if you are creating a goal with an average session duration such as this example, be sure to set the value in seconds, not minutes!
  6. Hit “Save alert”

If you hit email, you will start to receive emails each time the goal is hit!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.