My #1 frustration with Google Analytics since it started has been that it’s always limited you to setting up four goals per profile. This means that if you have more than 4 types of user events on your site that would constitute a “Goal” (shopping cart checkout, newsletter signup, contact form submission, etc), you’d be forced to create an additional profile in Google Analytics to track the additional goals, which means you’d have to flip between multiple profiles to see all your data. Sure, years ago, four might have seemed like plenty of goals…but it’s 2009, people. Fortunately, Google has smiled upon us and increased the limit of number of goals per profile to 20 (4 sets of 5).
Sure, it’d be great to have unlimited goals per profile, but I’ll take 20. Now all of our goal data can live together happily in one profile.
In addition to increasing the amount of goals allowed per profile, Google Analytics has also introduced a new feature called “Analytics Intelligence.” Right now, it’s pretty simple, but it goes a long way in helping you stay on top of what’s happening on your site. The simplest way to understand and take advantage of the new feature is to create a “Custom Alert” by following these steps:
1. Log into your Google Analytics account, select the Analytics account with the profile you want to view, and then click “View Reports” next to the website profile you’d like to view.
2. On the left-hand side, click the “Intelligence” Menu.
3. Beneath the graphs and the gray bar with the date on it, click the “+ Create a Custom Alert” link
4. On the next page, enter the following information in order to create an Alert any time your daily traffic goes beyond a certain number (replace the 200 with a number that would be abnormally high for your site):
Click Create Alert, and you’ve got a custom alert that will trigger each time your daily traffic surpasses that magic number. The alerts will show up on the “Intelligence” report, as well as in your email if you choose.
In addition to custom alerts, Google Analytics creates automatic alerts in the Intelligence report based on your site’s average performance. Automatic reports look at a variety of visitor patterns and changes to make you aware of traffic and other anomalies on your site. The best way to get familiar with all the features the “Intelligence” tab has to offer is by logging in and clicking through the alerts on the bar graph yourself. Maybe you’ll discover something surprising, insightful, and useful about your site’s visitors.
