One of the often praised aspects of digital marketing is the ability to track almost any action or behaviour on your website. This is hugely powerful and we quickly come to rely on the data available to us.
But what happens when something goes wrong? What if your tracking breaks and you only realise a few days later? Valuable information about the performance of your website and the behaviour of your consumers can be lost.
In the eCommerce space this can have even more severe consequences. If there is an issue on your check out page or your payment gateway has an issue and you are not alerted to the issue in real-time you could lose a significant amount of revenue and leave a poor impression on those customers trying to purchase on your website.
It is therefore critical that you as a business have an alert system in place to give you real-time warnings when something goes wrong. A well set up alert system is like the check engine light on your car and alerts you to potential issues in your digital ecosystem.
There are a couple of options when it comes to setting up alerts, these are explained briefly below:
Google Analytics Alerts
Google Analytics has built-in alert functionality that allows you to set custom alerts on pretty much anything you can track in Google Analytics. This is a good entry point and is better than nothing but unfortunately has its limitations. There are a lot of false positives and the logic and intelligence of the alerts are limited. For instance, you may get alerts firing over weekends or other low traffic periods.
If you don’t have any other alternatives then this is a good free option to cover the basics.
Alert/Tracking Software
There are a number of different options in the software space. These typically connect to your Google Analytics account and add a layer of logic and analysis to the data before alerting you of any issues. These range in price and can often be quite pricey on a monthly basis.
Algorithm has developed our own cost-effective alert and tracking software. As with most players in the market, we connect your Google Analytics data to the software and it provides real-time prioritised alerts. This lets you know if it’s a critical issue that may be impacting revenue or a less serious issue that doesn’t require immediate action.
What are some key things you should set alerts for?
Ecommerce
- Revenue: Any fluctuations in revenue need to be flagged urgently, this is your bottom line at stake.
- Conversion Rate: Good for highlighting issues in the user experience and technical checkout process.
- Transactions: Again tied to revenue, transactions are a leading measure to revenue, a drop in transactions needs urgent investigation.
Website & Content Performance
- Site Speed: An increasingly critical factor to performance in the digital space
- Bounce Rate: A change in bounce rate can be a killer for your website and online performance, if people are leaving your site you need to know why.
- Time on Site: Is your content performing as it should, are people reading and engaging with it? If this changes over time you need to be alerted to this so changes can be made.
- Sessions/Users: Drops in traffic from the various channels could indicate issues in those channels, for example, if organic traffic suddenly drops it could mean your site has indexation issues.
Data Layer Integrity
- Tracking Health: It is important that the tracking tags and set up on your site do not get corrupted or removed. An alert tool that flags if something happens to your tracking setup is key to avoid the loss of data.
Tools like the Algorithm Alert tracking tool will cover all of the above and provide real-time alerts when something goes wrong. This gives you peace of mind that your website is functioning as it should be and that your data integrity is secure and functioning as it should be.
If you are worried about losing leads or revenue and would like to enquire about our alert tools, please contact a member of the Algorithm team, and they will be happy to advise and assist you.
Author: Graeme Stiles
