Google Analytics Statistically Significant Alerts
About
Statistically significant alerts are by far the easiest and the fastest way to get started. They work best for steady traffic and can easily catch any traffic fluctuation.
It's still up to you to judge whenever that traffic glitch was significant from the business perspective though. By checking the last few weeks averages, we ensure that number changed in a mathematically statistically significant way, but it still can be a matter of circumstances (like Christmas, Black Friday or any other event).
The goal of this type of alert to get a sense of your project traffic. It will help you to move forward on more advanced tracking like custom alerts.
Google Analytics alerts examples
The easiest way to start is to setup a standard alert for common metrics like sessions, page views, and users. By having these alerts, you'll be sure that if any of the metrics will fluctuate, you'll receive a notification.
Another great example could be tracking your Goals. If you've done Goals setup in your Google Analytics but haven't yet figured out the pattern of conversions, then it's a good time to add a statistical significance alert. Before diving in into advanced custom alerts, you can measure how your Goal (which is usually based by a conversion) vary during the week. You'll receive a notification via each time Goal will exceed or fall behind statistical ranges. This way you'll learn a lot faster what is "normal" and what is good or bad means for your project.
How to setup a statistically significant (standard) alert
- Go to Alert Agents Dashboard
- Click "New Alert Agent" and select "Standard"
- Choose Google Analytics view to track
- Enter the alert name
- Choose metrics to track:
- Most common metrics like sessions, pageviews, and users
- Advanced metrics like goal completion rate, event value, and page load time
- Select "Show Deviation" to have more details in the alert
- If you find alert firing too often, try reducing "Precision %" to something like 95%. Keep in mind that the lower the precision is, the more frequent you'll receive alerts.
- Configure integrations, turn on/off Zapier and Slack
- Alert can notify you in one of 4 ways:
- By email
- With the help of Zapier integration
- Via Slack
- By your chosen service directly, via webhook
- Click "Save"