Proactive website monitoring is being added to our Google Analytics reporting

In providing analytics reporting, we know that sometimes you want to be informed about something significant happening on your website  when it happens – rather than when you happen to notice it.

You only want to know if it’s significant (reporting by exception) and you want some brief context at the same time: why is it happening?

Some brief examples are:

• Your website suddenly becoming very slow (because of a slow often-accessed individual page or generally)
• Seeing a big jump or fall in search traffic (because you have a new article that’s done really well in search or you’ve accidentally made a configuration change which has damaged your presence in search engines)
• A big jump in social traffic (something you’ve shared has gone viral)

For a couple of months we have been running monitoring on a pilot basis and are rolling it out for existing clients this quarter.

There is no big change to our GA+ reporting: all that happens is that if we identify something significant we’ll tell you about it (what it was and why it happened). This is not automated – the data goes through our analytics team and we evaluate the cause and magnitude to decide whether it’s significant. You might only expect us to send you a monitoring exception email a couple of times a year or less.

If you have any feedback about this new feature, as always, let us know.

Photo by Pete Slater