My favorite feature of Google Analytics is the Intelligence Events section.
What are Intelligence Events?
Intelligence Events are alerts that register when statistically significant variations occur on your site. Google Analytics is constantly monitoring the traffic on your site. Anytime it finds something out of the ordinary, it places an alert in the Intelligence Events section of your Analytics dashboard.
I like to think of Intelligence Events as my own personal assistant. I call him Jarvis.
Jarvis is a very detailed and calculated assistant who alerts me of major changes happening on my site. He even categorizes them into daily, weekly, and monthly alerts sorted by importance.
Why you should use Intelligence Events?
There is a lot of data to look at in your Analytics reports. You are bound to miss things. Intelligence Events (Jarvis) is your helping hand- alerting you of anomalies happening on your site. Once alerted, you can dig down and find insights you may not have considered at first glance.
There are two types of Intelligence Events:
Automatic: These alerts are generated whenever Google Analytics detects significant changes in your traffic patterns. They range from changes in visits, revenue, and goal completions to time on site.
Custom: Custom alerts trigger when traffic reaches a specific threshold . For example, Jarvis alerts me when traffic on my site from New York rises by 30% within a certain timeframe.
Follow this link for 5 custom alert examples to get you started.
Where can you find Intelligence Events?
You can find these wonderful insights in the Home tab of Google Analytics:
Real Life Experience
Last month, Jarvis alerted me to this surprising spike in revenue:
Revenue from (undisclosed location) spiked 500% in October.
Very interesting. (undisclosed location) is typically not a high revenue generating location, so I decided to dig a little deeper.
I found a few things of interest.
- This location has two national holidays in October
- All purchases came from Organic searches
I quickly made an annotation in Google Analytics and went to talk to our product and promotions team to see how we could capitalize on this opportunity for next year.
Conclusion
Without the help of Intelligence Events, the revenue spike from (undisclosed location) may have gone unnoticed Every week revenue spikes for one reason or another, especially in our seasonality of a business.
However, Google Analytics was able to identify that a revenue spike from (undisclosed location) was an anomaly compared to the “normal” revenue spikes we see in a week.
Question: Do you use intelligence events? If so, what trends or surprises have you found?
