Did you know that there’s a quick way to create advanced segments from automatic alerts? This is one of those “I can’t believe how powerful this is and yet so easy to do” features. Let me illustrate with an example from the Google Store site. A few months ago, on February 5, the Google Store received a surge of traffic from TechCrunch.com. We would not have noticed this extra traffic were it not for Analytics Intelligence. In the following screenshot, you can see that the store ordinarily receives between 0 and 221 visits from TechCrunch, but on this day, it received 1,918 visits.

What happened was that TechCrunch ran an article about Google scarves that were being sold in the store. But, here’s the tip I want to share with you. First, you can graph just the

relevant traffic simply by clicking the button on the alert.

And, you can create an advanced segment just by clicking the Create Segment link at the far right of the alert.

Now you can compare this traffic side by side with overall site traffic or with traffic from other segments. Check out this video to see how this works and to learn more automatic alert tips.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team