November 20, 2009 by Jack Fox
Today on the blog, I want to talk about a new beta function of analytics that’s currently in the process of beta testing, ‘Intelligence’. I’m going to resist all the obviou jokes, finally some intelligence on this blog, etc., and just tell you that it’s… Amazing.
The Google Blog puts it like this, ‘a dedicated assistant who is focused exclusively on your site’s analytics? Your assistant would be so diligent and detailed that they wouldn’t miss a thing.’ As usual, this is Google self congratulating, but also as usual the congratulations are entirely justified. It basically works like this. Intelligence will watch your site’s analytics data and flag when anything significant happens and place an alert on a timeline with the exact date. It will also rank the alerts in order the results in terms of relative importance. The whole thing ends up looking like a bar chart on a month by month timeline.
This is an absolute godsend for anyone whose job it is to analyse websites, for one simple reason – it cuts through the data. Up until now, Analytics has almost been a victim of its own success – the sheer amount of information you can track with Analytics data can be a little intimidating, what’s more, no one working on a big site can hope to track it all which means it can be easy to miss pertinent information.
Just to drive home how this could be useful, here’s a helpful hypothetical example. You run a popular ecommerce website, one day you’re looking at Intelligence and you notice that on Wednesday last week your bounce rate suddenly jumped 25 percent. You reasonably assume there must be a reason and, because Analytics can’t do everything for you… yet, you set out to find out what it is.
You call an immediate staff meeting to discuss what happened on Wednesday and find out that a picture was added to the flash banner at the top. Since that was the only change you assume that was it and remove it, if over the next few days the bounce rate goes back then you know you were right. Obviously that’s a simplistic example, though the principle stands for everything.
Another great thing about Intelligence is that it has a quite a sophisticated algorithm behind it, which means that, according to Google, it can tell the difference between changes that are part of ongoing trends and ones which are properly out of the ordinary.
All in all, it’s actually remarkably simple to use though, as this is analytics, there are ways to complicate it. You can instruct it to be on the lookout for specific things and
even set up custom alerts, much like you can do with Analytics goals. The finer points of this will be the subject of a post or two in the near future… Once I’ve figured out exactly what those finer points are that is.
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- Analytics School – Ten Top Tips
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- Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash
- Analytics School: Add a PPC Only Profile to Analytics
- Getting the best ROI from Adwords using Google Analytics
- Getting the best ROI from Adwords using Google Analytics (part 2)
