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Another Suggestion for Google Analytics - “Link Event” Alerts

Yes, sharing Analytics would be great, but that’s not my only suggestion.

As a new blogger, I’m particularly attuned to “Link Events” - those anomalies where traffic spikes like crazy due to a mention on another site, getting Dugg, or whatever. Often I don’t find out about these till the next day when Google Analytics has updated; that’s a big missed opportunity as I try to capitalize on link events by putting out a custom message targeted to visitors from a specific page.

So - here’s what Google could do for me: based on Analytic’s knowledge of my average daily traffic, send me an SMS and an Email when there’s a link event and traffic is surging. Tell me:

The time it started.
The referrering domain and page.
How much traffic I’m getting per minute.

Do this in real time. I don’t care if the main analytics readout doesn’t update for a few hours, but use your datastores to make time-sensitive info available when its needed.

Theoretically other services could provide this as well - whos.amung.us, for instance, or MyBlogLog, or the WordPress Stats plugin. Maybe this service is being offered already somewhere? If so, please let me know.

analytics, google, linkevent, mybloglog, suggestion., techfold wordpress

2 Responses to “Another Suggestion for Google Analytics - “Link Event” Alerts”

Greg O'Byrne | June 11th, 2007 at 10:09 am

So one thing.

Google doesn’t “update the next day”, it only shows the last days date by default. The current date is available for viewing the data. So you can see the traffic occurring during the event.

You have to go in and set a custom date range. Make sure you choose todays date along with the rest of your desired range and voila’, you can see todays traffic.

Now this doesn’t solve your messaging wish. But seeing as analytics is built on top of Urchin and Urchin had all that back in the day, it should still be in the code somewhere.
Rod | June 11th, 2007 at 10:57 am

Hey Greg - thanks for the comment. I do regularly look at “today’s” metrics by clicking on today’s date, but the update cycle only seems to run a few times during the day - around 8AM, 12 noon, 6PM, and 11PM, based on my anecdotal experience. So for large portions of the day, stats are not “real time,” per se.

That’s my experience anyway; WordPress Stats plugin, by comparison, is fully realtime - I can watch referrer URL’s accumulate as it happens, which is what I’m using in lieu of notifications for the moment.

Anyway - thanks for the tip!