5 Google Analytics Custom Alerts for SEO You Need to Track
As an SEO manager or a marketer, you’re probably too busy to go through the different data and metrics of your website and analyze it every single day to monitor your performance and notice any changes. Even the process of retrieving the data from Google Analytics and comparing it with historical data can be tedious.
To solve that, Google Analytics events tracking allows you to set up custom events that would trigger actions based on specific behaviors on your website — for example, tracking changes to your pageviews, session durations, traffic referral, etc.
With so many options that Google Analytics has to offer, it can be confusing as to which alerts you should set up. Below we will discuss the five essential Google Analytics custom alerts for SEO that are a must-have.
You’ll also find more information at the end of the post on how you can set them up instantly with Slack alerts using dashdash and how to get early access to the platform.
Custom Alert #1: Drop in Organic Traffic
A drop in organic traffic can be normal and can be affected by different factors like seasonality. However, since organic visitors come to your website from a search engine, it can be an indicator of SEO issues.
That’s why it’s crucial to get alerted when drastic changes in organic traffic occur. The change percentage that you should set depends entirely on your average website organic traffic. The higher your organic traffic, the lower you should set the percentage of change as its sensitivity decreases.
You should check the average daily organic traffic you get and the average change of traffic week-over-week. Then, you should set the alert trigger percentage to be slightly higher than your average. You can set the percentage to a positive value to track spikes or a negative one to track drops in your traffic. You can also choose to monitor the traffic of a specific page as opposed to the entire website.
Custom Alert #2: Drop in Page Visits
Having an alert for when page visits drop is essential when tracking the performance of different pages individually — for example, your landing pages. It allows you to quickly identify any issues with your top-performing pages and fix them immediately. You can also track spikes in page visits, which could indicate an important mention on a website or social media.
A drop in pageviews starting somewhere from 20% to 50% week-over-week would be something to worry about.
Custom Alert #3: Drop in Goal Conversions
A drop in your goal conversions or completions can indicate an issue with your conversion funnel. It could show that one of the funnel steps like a content piece or a landing page is performing poorly and needs your attention.
On average, a 15% drop in goal conversions from one week to the next would be alarming. That’s why not having such an alert can be very costly for your business as you would be missing out on a lot of opportunities that you could have had had you caught the issue earlier.
Custom Alert #4: Spike in 404 Visits
Not only can a spike in the number of users coming across 404 pages on your website indicate a problem with your user experience, but it can also affect your SEO performance. The number of 404 page visits that would be considered alarming depends on your website traffic. Having a few 404 page views when you get thousands of visitors should be fine, but if the number suspiciously increases drastically, this can be an indication of an SEO issue on your website.
Setting up an alert that is triggered by a week-over-week 10% increase in 404 visits is, in most cases, a good indicator. The issue is usually caused by broken internal links, which causes search crawlers to get stuck trying to reach non-existent pages on your website, which can harm your SEO and rankings. Once the alert is received, you can easily use Google Search Console to identify the issue’s source and fix it.
For the alert to work, your 404 pages need to have a custom page title that would be used to track them. The most common formats look something like “Website | Not Found” or “Page Not Found | Website”. However, you can always customize them as you wish.
Custom Alert #5: Spike in Bounce Rate
The last alert is for spikes in your bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of users who exit the website after viewing only one page. You have to monitor the bounce rate, especially for your top-performing landing pages. That way, you can immediately take any needed actions like optimizing the content of the page or adjusting your call to actions.
Bounce rates can differ vastly depending on your business or the content of your website. For example, blogs naturally have lower bounce rate since it’s more likely for users to view more than one post or article as opposed to more commercial or business websites.
Get Started With These Alerts Now!
Instead of having to spend a lot of time and effort setting up these custom Google Analytics alerts, you can get started with all five of them right away using the “Get SEO website performance alerts” dashdash template. It will send you timely alerts straight to your Slack workspace, which is a feature you can’t set up through Google Analytics. Alternatively, you can adjust it to have them sent to your email instead or even by SMS.
Did I mention that it’s FREE and only takes a few minutes to set up?
Get Early Access!
To get a dashdash account and set up your custom Google Analytics alerts, you can reach out to me via:
- Email: hady@dashdash.com
- Twitter: @HadyElHady93
- Calendly: Book a call so I can help you set up your alerts and get started.
