Making Analytics Report to You

Let's face it - your website is probably one of many things you are tasked with each day. Logging in to analytics and checking stats may not be #1 on your list of priorities, and why should it be? If we look at Analytics as we would a human  analyst, we can find some ways to better use this valuable resource.

Push, pull, whatever - just give me the answers!

So often analytics tools are used in a 'pull' model. Every time you need an answer, you go to the tool, and 'pull down' some sort of data, chart, etc. It does not need to be this way. If you had a person doing this job, would you tolerate this situation? Imagine that - you need a report each month, but they don't provide anything until you walk over to their desk and say (as if it has never been asked before) "hey, can I get the number of sales from the website for last month?". This would be just silly. You would ask your analyst to provide this info on a regular basis. Of course analytics offers this feature. In fact, you can customize your reports and have them sent at any frequency in many different formats. Done - that just happened.

Wait wait - don't tell me - until it matters

So, we're getting closer. We now have our analyst providing regular information to us so we can monitor the success of our website. We can do better. Why don't we also ask them to watch the site and let us know when something interesting happens? Yes - with Google's Intelligence Alerts we can setup email alerts to inform us of interesting or alarming activity on the website. For example, has our "page not found" page been visited way more than usual on a given day? Are more people than usual abandoning our shopping cart this week, this month, or today? How about some good news? Are sales up? Are leads up? Why? Now we're getting somewhere.

If you haven't checked this feature out yet - take a look - it's a great way to get Analytics to finally start reporting to you.