By Elmer on November 6, 2009

Google Analytics reports just got a little more flexible! If you look into your Google Analytics reports, you’ll see a new beta feature just added. It’s the Intelligence menu, the latest major category added since Goals was introduced a few years ago.

Just like an intelligence network in the military, this report tries to interpret what a certain deviation of report metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly, and monthly reports. Typically if we notice a surge in traffic on a fine Tuesday morning, we initially investigate what must have influenced such irregular traffic pattern. We look at traffic sources and ask questions such as:

1. Was our email marketing campaign with over 75,000 recipients launched on that day?
2. Was our blog posted on that day made its way to Digg headlines?
3. Was our article cited by a big-name company and linked to it?

While Google Analytics Intelligence reports don’t emulate such findings, it nonetheless provides helpful hints that save us time.

We can pick one day within the date range and examine the alerts available for that day, if any. Alerts are displayed below and indicate which metric or dimension has delivered unusual value. This could either be good or bad news to a webmaster. But by knowing the bad news, it becomes good news to know, as what Google uses when promoting Google Analytics.

Interesting observations
1. We can adjust the sensitivity of alerts being displayed. The higher the sensitivity, the more alerts we see. More significant alerts are shown even at lower sensitivity settings because Google Analytics deems this information as important. Significance of these alerts is defined as the difference between the actual performance (current) and expected performance (average).

2. Further segmentation of alerts is possible for easy access. If we see one alert as more important than the others, we can create custom segment that will be tracked separately.

3. It is possible to group the alerts by metrics (bounce, clicks, time on site) or dimensions (exit page, city, label).

Play around with it to experience the power of Intelligence Engine of Google Analytics.

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