Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Using Metric Alerts
Although we've talked about various ways to query your data and even combine que-
ries for reports that help create insight, there is still value in reporting on your Kpis
and generally important metrics. Rather than randomly surfing reports, you can delve
in to your analytics tool to get critical business information on single metrics, once you
have defined those that are important to report back to your team or management.
in many situations, the absolute value of a metric is not important as such, but
it becomes critical if that number goes beyond or below a set of predefined thresholds.
As you'll recall from our discussion on color-coding your data in Chapter 6, “Working
with Report Results,” when you read the results of a report, you should be able to eas-
ily discern whether a metric is performing poorly.
the ability to color-code the data is still extremely valuable for communicat-
ing about abnormal metric behavior. But keep in mind that color-coding your data is
not the same as monitoring the data. monitoring the data is a manual task. the effort
you expend on monitoring data should be comparable to the level of business risk you
assume if the target metric does not meet its performance goals.
You can set up scheduled emails and receive 50 reports daily. this might be
something to consider when you're monitoring important metrics. However, receiving
anything beyond a small handful of web analytics emails a day is not likely to allow
you to consume all the numbers and at the same time monitor them for abnormalities.
in addition, you would damage the reporting structure by poisoning valuable data
communication with irrelevant “noise”—in other words, emails with little or no action
attached to them.
Yahoo! Web Analytics provides a function called Alerts that monitors the data
and alerts you if anything out of the ordinary happens. You can stay on top of your
website's performance by setting up customized email metric alerts. the Alerts func-
tion allows you to schedule email alerts for you and your colleagues, depending on the
performance of your website. You can define email alerts by identifying high/low val-
ues for your key metrics or significant percentage changes based on past performance.
Alerts can save you time by letting you automatically scout dozens of reports at
the same time and essentially thousands of metrics, and receive an email only if some-
thing unusual happens.
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What to Monitor with an Alert
the option to set up alerts is not apparent in the interface, so it's easy to forget if you
do not know how to access it. As you can see in Figure 7.1, the Add Alert option pops
up when you right-click any acceptable metric in a report.
in our example we've clicked the Visits metric from Aol search. this opens the
edit Alert dialog shown in Figure 7.2.
