Analytics gets Intelligent

About a month ago Google released Google Analytics Intelligence and we’ve been having a lot of fun playing with it here at iCrossing. In a nutshell it does statistical analysis on your analytics data and highlights areas where you might want to look, thereby saving you time and potentially highlighting things you would not have normally noticed. The system does a lot of the data crunching for you allowing you to hone in on the interesting parts and pull our great insights quickly and easily.

The above screenshot shows traffic to our site (top line in blue) and the alerts generated below (green bars). You can see the traffic shows a weekly pattern of peaking on Mondays and falling at the weekend (I guess people aren’t so interested in reading about digital marketing at the weekends!) nice insight but we already knew that and it’s too easy!

By clicking on the alerts we get to see what that alert refers to, in this case it shows us that on Saturday the 3rd the bounce rate dropped 15% below average. Looking at some of the other alerts shows us that next Saturday the bounce rate again dropped below average (perhaps there’s a pattern here). The following Saturday the bounce rate didn’t drop significantly but the next Saturday showed an 133% increase in time spent on site.

When first looking at the data it seemed that Saturday was our worst performing day as traffic was at its lowest point here, however by using the Intelligence feature in Google Analytics we can see that although there isn’t as much traffic at the weekend, the traffic we get is more engaged. Users arriving on the site are more inclined to hang around, and hang around for longer. However the best bit is that it took less than 5 minutes to find this information, leaving more time to do something with it. Having access to a large warehouse of information is useless unless you know what to do with it and this feature just made it easier for you or your analyst to pull out precious gems of insight to help optimise your site / campaign and ultimately help generate more revenue.

Image credit: PalScience