When I opened up my Google Analytics today I noticed that I have been given access to the Beta for the new Google Analytics alerts - shown above in the LHS menu (under "Intelligence") and below the traffic graph.

How it works is, if Google analytics detects a change in the pattern of your site traffic, or other metrics, it can send you an email to let you know.  This way, you don't have to log in to keep checking, you can rest assured that if something important happens, you will know.

Below is a screen shot of how you create the alerts - first you choose the thing you want to monitor (in this case a keyword), then you choose the metric (in this case I chose visits), then you choose a condition - you might want to make it over a certain amount (your average, for example), or a % increase or decrease could trigger the alert.



This way, for example, I could get an email alert sent to me whenever the number of visits for the term "digital media" exceeds 200 or falls below 50.

For your business, maybe you want to know when your 'Melbourne' campaign has started working, so you set up a Google analytics alert to trigger visits from Melbourne increasing above average. 

Maybe your site relies heavily on traffic from a certain referrer or source - you can make an alert for when traffic from that important source dips below a certain level.

You can monitor almost any Google metric, and I think nearly every business could find a use for them.


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