Adwords gets Intelligent

Two new features of interest are bundled into the Intelligence(beta) section of Google Analytics.

Adwords Intelligence

Firstly an Adwords intelligence component, now to access this you will need to have joined your Google Adwords account to Google Analytics.

Then just navigate to the Google Analytics intelligence report and just check the Adwords tick box below the graph. This will show you your alerts for adwords in the bar chart and you can click on each day under daily alerts or even look at a broader view under weekly and monthly alerts.

The great thing about intelligence is, day to day, it will show you if a significant change has occured to one or more measures in your Google Adwords program. Their report gives you two views to use "metrics" and "dimensions".

We think the metrics view is particularly easy to follow. For example, I can scan down the metrics and see under bounce rates or conversions where there has been a significant change in the activity for a particular keyword or adgroup.

Fantastic if I have just put in some new keywords. I can see at a glance if my change is delivering the goods. Conversely I can switch on the dimensions view and go straight to my landing pages and see if I am getting good performance today.

Custom Alerts

The second new feature for intelligence is the custom alerts feature. Here I can set up, in advance, a range of triggers and get myself alerted by email regularly.

To use it just navigate to the Create a Custom Alert link

Once here I can configure a range of triggers making them as simple or as complex as I want using a drag drop interface for dimensions or metrics. In a similar way as I would do with custom segments or custom reports.

For example, going back to the previous section, say I wanted to monitor conversions or bounces for my pay per click campaign once it reached a certain threshold or target value.

I can set a targeted alert to mail me for "medium matches cpc" and say "conversions is greater than 100" for "daily" if it is a daily goal or even weekly or monthly if it is a more extended goal.

Conversely, if my bounce rate for a keyword or keyword group rises too high I set up a warning alert and would be able to take some corrective action.

Now that saves me a lot of time and effort that I can best use to improving my campaigns.

Here is a link to the Google Analytic post on these features.