Have you experimented with the Google Intelligence functionality that has been added to your Google Analytics account? If not, you should. It’s simple to set up and it’s a good exercise in getting you think and hopefully act more strategically about your website analytics. Below the image of the Intelligence interface I outline two common traits that we see with brand marketers who use analytics and how Google Intelligence addresses one of them.

Two Common Traits
Whether they engage in commerce online or not, all marketers know that they need a website that communicates about their services and products. Most of these marketers know that they should be looking at their website’s analytics to learn about the behavior of their customers and/or people interested in their brand. However…

1.) The brand marketers who do follow their website analytics tend to do so on a scheduled and infrequent basis. The result is that the data on customer behavior is old and is used as a measure of past success, not a measure of what they should do next. The later is what you should be focused on and Google Intelligence now lets you address this by allowing you to set up alerts around certain statistics such as changes in bounce rate, popularity of content or increase in visitors from a certain geographic area. The data is not in real time but it is much more fresh, and therefore actionable, than if you were checking your stats on a weekly or monthly basis.

If you’re a brand marketer, finish this sentence “I would like to know when someone ________ on our website.” You could previously do this with Omniture but now you can with your free Google Analytics account.

2.) While smart marketers see their website analytics as free market research, they don’t react strategically. Responding to analytics data with appropriate content is often not easy because of any one of the barriers of technical capability/support, time, or budget. Too often we see brand websites that are more or less “finished” after their initial launch and ongoing analytics are not used to fine tune them. This is the equivalent of burying your head in the sand.

Google Intelligence does not address this second point but perhaps being alerted to a problem/opportunity in their website will motivate the best marketers to take action and use their brand site as a strategic and malleable tool, not one that was launched without a pilot.

You can learn more about Google Intelligence here.