Google Analytics recently added a new feature, called Alerts. At first glance, it’s an elegant way to show someone when a KPI on their site has changed significantly from what’s expected. It’s baselining, applied to all KPIs — even the ones you’re not looking at.

This is a great idea for folks who forget to check their analytics data, because now they can find out about significant events. It tricks you into being a better analyst. It encourages baselining, segmentation, and thinking about your business. But we think it’s the start of something bigger, once it incorporates the things Google and others know about your online presence.

Details, and some juicy UI mockup speculation, after the jump.

Baselining, even when you didn’t know you should

Beginner web analysts treat analytics as accounting. They use it to report the news, not make the news. It’s only the more advanced analysts that see analytics as a means for optimization, using things like A/B testing to learn whether a change made things better. And to do that, you need a baseline.

The new feature learns what normal is, then shows you deviation. This encourages experimentation: “I tried something new today, and I can see the results.” Google’s already introduced comparative rankings, showing you how you’re doing against others; now, they make it much easier to identify significant changes to your site, even if you don’t know where to look.

Imagine, for example, that you change your website. You don’t see an appreciable shift in traffic volume, so you decide it didn’t have an effect. But hidden in those traffic numbers is the fact that there was an increase in European traffic at the expense of US traffic. The new functionality would show you this, allowing you to tailor content to specific geographies.

Making segmentation easy to try

The new functionality tries to find chunks of traffic that have “broken away from the pack.” It does this for known metrics and segments — such as geographic regions — as follows:

Notice that little “create segment” at the end? It makes it easy to carve out a slice of traffic you should care about, which then means you can start to play and experiment with it. Segmenting traffic is a sign of web analytics maturity, but until recently, it’s been something few people play with. Now, Google Analytics is essentially telling you, “hey, dummy, have a closer look at this.”

You can use custom segments in lots of cool ways–for example, as the analysis above shows, I now know that returning US visitors are more likely to download content from the site, but first-timers aren’t. Once you’ve seen a segment that Google found for you, you’re more likely to create your own because you understand how they work.

Thinking about your business

You can also set up custom alerts within the system to tell you when something’s gone out of kilter. We know lots of companies who use revenue or transactions per second as the first sign that something’s wrong on the website — this is a great top-down approach if you can manage it, because it means everyone in the company is focused on what actually pays the bills.

The new functionality lets you look for specific occurrences even before they happen. Consider @alexbfree’s recent post on Twitter Retweeting, which got picked up by Dave Winer. You can set up an alert to see if Dave sends you traffic:

Overall, these are excellent enhancements to the product. They’ll improve engagement — because the system will tell you when things are happening, rather than waiting for you to log in. They’ll encourage good behaviors like baselining and segmentation. And they’ll also satisfy the less business-centric, more hobbyist segment that just wants to know when the world is thinking about them.

What I really want: a holistic view

It’ll be more useful (and in keeping with the Complete Web Monitoring philosophy) when it includes other kinds of data:

• A timeline of posts created, based on Feedburner statistics or blog history
• A series of Google Alerts showing when some search criteria on the web is met
• A volume of followers or friends obtained through the APIs of social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr
• Performance data from synthetic or real user monitoring
• Voice of the Customer feedback through systems like Kampyle

Here’s an example of what that could be like, for a content creator/blogger.

That’s a pretty intimidating amount of information. Most of it, Google already has; some, we’d get from elsewhere. We borrowed concepts from:

• Bit.ly’s historical views (over a longer time period) with a rollover for individual links on a given day
• Google Labs’ News timeline
• The dashboard of Wordpress
• Postrank’s content scoring system (we spent time with these folks this week)
• Feedburner RSS stats
• Email subscription management stats from a mailing list provider
• Moni.tor.us performance monitoring
• Trendistic’s timeline graph of Twitter (with a rollover of Outwit.me’s realtime tag cloud)
• Google Alerts, which come in by mail but could be turned into a timeline with rollovers

Anyone with a bit of time and some spreadsheet know-how can assemble this manually; it could also be done in Greasemonkey with a bit of work, using Google’s new views as the anchor.

Admittedly, this is still “reporting the news” — the real insight comes from observing correlations, such as what kinds of posts increase subscriptions or what news drives follower count. And this is targeted at a specific kind of site (media/community) whereas other businesses more focused on SaaS or e-commerce revenues probably want something that shows productivity or conversion rates.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of money in giving tools to bloggers. We’re a cheap bunch. So while there’s great multivariate testing for online retailers, a content creator has to cobble together many different views and data sources to paint a complete picture.

Related posts:

1. Complete Web Monitoring slides from Coradiant lunches
2. 3 reasons why real time analytics tools are essential
3. Beth Kanter and Non-Profit Analytics

We’re finishing a busy week in New York, with presentations at both Web2Expo and Interop New York. We had a great time running our first Communilytics Boot Camp, and O’Reilly’s bookstore sold out of our book.

The Communilytics stuff was really interesting; we proposed a new “long funnel” model that incorporates both community metrics (such as followers, amplification, and the like) and traditional analytics (conversion rate, checkout value, and so on.) It’s a holistic approach, and we’ll write it up here soon.

We also looked at message propagation in communities a bit. Here’s a clip from the session, which discusses how the combination of Twitter’s formalized Retweet and an understanding of relevance can create “pagerank for humans” in microblogging platforms that share Twitter’s asymmetric-follow pattern.

Completely independent of this, Alex Bowyer over on Bitcurrent wrote a thoughtful piece on how Twitter should have formalized Retweeting, and some of the issues with the current model.

Unfortunately, there’s some strangeness going on between Youtube and Keynote’s video export, so the last 30 seconds of this are clipped. Basically we make the point that this is how to monetize microblog analytics, either by selling sentiment propagation analysis, finding out who influential proponents and detractors are, or knowing where to display ads and to whom.

Related posts:

1. Twitter New User Survival Guide

Hello, fellow TechCrunch/blog readers.  This site supports the O’Reilly book I co-authored with Alistair Croll called “Complete Web Monitoring“.  Feel free to subscribe to it (we’re low volume).  We talk about things like this (how to launch a site and monitor it properly).  You can find information about us here.

I saw a tweet this morning in TweetDeck which I found bewildering. A friend of mine, Lori, claimed that my account was suspended.

I loaded up my profile page and, sure enough, the owl of doom stared back at me.

I jumped through the regular hoops, advising supended@twitter.com and resisting the urge to email folks like John Adams at Twitter (by the time I email them, I know they’ll have floods of notifications already).

I did a little bit of snooping and happened upon Tim Oreilly’s profile.  Also suspended.  Then @w2e, @brady and @palhlkadot.  All of them, suspended.

So, it seems that Twitter has decided to wage war on those of us related to O’Reilly Media! Oh noes!

In all seriousness, this appears to be an outage affecting quite a few accounts that are obviously legitimate.  I’m sure news about this will surface during the day.

Many of us have dealt with Twitter outages in the past – but it does give me a chance to reflect upon how bad it may look to others when they see the “Suspended” flag waving on my pile of sand.

Does it matter?  Thoughts?

Related posts:

1. Twitter New User Survival Guide

(image by Yiying Lu)

You’re new to Twitter.  Welcome.  Your first impression is probably just like mine was when I first joined:  “…… now what?”.

The answer: follow this guide.

Step 1: Getting set up

Let’s take care of some plumbing first.

Stop using the web interface (www.twitter.com) right now

Twitter clearly doesn’t want you to use its website, because it is horrible .  It is so abysmal that “keeping track of the conversation” is impossible.   Stop using the web interface right now.

Instead, use a Twitter client.  It will making twittering much easier (you’ll save time) and it will be more enjoyable to keep track of people (you wont need to visit twitter.com every few minutes to see if someone’s trying to communicate with you).

I use TweetDeck on my Mac and PC and strongly suggest you use it as well.  I’ve heard many recommending Twhirl as well.  There are other clients – many are listed at www.twitter.com/downloads if you’re interested.

Get used to 140 characters.

All talk on twitter is 140 characters or less.  Get used to URL shortening services like http://bit.ly and http://is.gd.  They take really long URLs and make them really short.  You’ll be using these anytime you want to share a URL that you think is worth sharing (happens a lot).  Thankfully, TweetDeck integrates these services – so you wont need to leave your client when you want to link to something clever.

Communicating with people: Using the @ sign

When you want to say something to everyone, just say it.  Example: “Hi everyone!  It’s great to be on Twitter!”

When you want to say something to someone in particular, begin your twit with the @ sign then their username.  Example: “@seanpower hi there!  Thanks for this guide!”

When you want to say something to someone but want everyone to read it, don’t start your twit with an @ sign.  Example: “You should follow @seanpower and co-author @acroll.  Their book, Total Web Monitoring is awesome.”

Step 2:  Connecting with others

Twitter is about connecting with people.  Since you’re starting out, you can check out what people are saying in a stalker-like fashion.  You can listen in on conversations without others knowing that you are doing so.   Don’t worry.  On Twitter, this is not considered creepy.

Don’t add people you don’t know (for now).

It might be very tempting to add as many people as you possibly can as soon as you join Twitter, but don’t just yet.  You’re new here, so you’ll probably get snubbed if you do it right away.  Instead, during your first couple of days on Twitter, add people that you know relatively well.  You can (and should)add more users once you get the hang of using TweetDeck.  I find that most people start to “get” Twitter by the time they’ve added 30 people, written 30 tweets and spent about 7 days casually poking around different profiles.

The key to twitter: Using Twitter Search – lots.

Tweetdeck has a magnifying glass icon.

It sets up searchs for specific topics.   Since I’m interested in web performance and analytics, I’ve setup a search like this: “analytics OR performance OR logs OR analysis OR optimization OR site down” (without the brackets).

If you’re interested in teaching, try “teachers OR classroom OR teaching OR brats misbehaving”.  Hiphop head?  Try a search term like “hiphop OR rap OR freestyle battle OR rhymes OR turntablism OR turntablist OR graffiti OR breakdancing”, etc.  You’ll probably notice that you get a few false positives (search queries that match, but aren’t about what you’re interested in), so you may need to tweak it a bit.  Either way, this search box will showcase a list of people talking of subjects that are of interest to you.

Once you’ve set this up, you can then “inject” yourself into a conversation.  For example:

In my “analytics” search stream, I found a person called @webtrafficroi that tweeted the following message:

Since I had a few minutes on my hands, I replied that it was probably larger than that, because he was not taking into account direct traffic from Twitter clients like TweetDeck.  I replied to him despite the fact that I did not know him, and had never talked to him before.

We conversed for a while, and the conversation ended up like this:

As a result of his tweet, I gained 7 followers (presumably people reading his profile).

My motivations weren’t about getting new followers.  I simply joined in on a conversation that was relevant to my interests.  Let me be clear.  You don’t have to talk to people if you don’t want to, and they may not follow you as a result of you talking to them, but joining a conversation is a great way to “get started” with Twitter.   Even if you’re only interested in finding a few cool people to talk to, using search is the way to unleash Twitter.

Step 3: Make people want to follow you

But if you’ve found someone cool to talk to, you’ll want to increase your chances that they’ll talk to you back.  Many times, if you speak to someone (or someone sees you say something mildly interesting), the first thing that they will do is to check out your profile.  They will judge you in an instant based on the information found here.

Tweak your profile

If you don’t fill out your profile, I probably won’t talk to you, because you’re probably a spammer.  You can demonstrate that you’re not a spammer to me by doing a few things on your settings page – (http://twitter.com/account/settings)

Username: most spammers that come on twitter have numbers in their username (ie – girl74, boy48, randomword62).  Try not to use numbers in your username if you can help it.

More Info URL: If you have a blog, profile or website that you’re associated with, tell people.  I often go to a person’s website to figure out if I want to listen to them or not.

One Line Bio: Fill in a short description of yourself.   Examples you can use: “music addict, architecture student, food lover.”, “mom that’s trying to outgeek her kids”, “marketing director at Acme Inc.”, “author and blogger passionate about marketing and PR”, “drummer for We Are Awesome, producer and remixer”.   By writing something about yourself, you tell me that you are a human, and give me an idea of who you are.  Don’t write something like “marketing expert”, “PHP guru”, “linux master” – you’ll just come across as being an egotistical jerk (unless that’s what you’re going for!).

Location: Filling out your location isn’t mandatory, but I like to know what city / country a person is in.

Upload a picture.  I don’t care what the picture is – just upload something.  It doesn’t have to be a picture of you.  It can be anything, really, as long as it’s not offensive and annoying or embarrassing to look at.  Upload your picture at http://twitter.com/account/picture

Add Alistair and I

Alistair is @acroll and I’m @seanpower :).  Click on those two links and hit the “Follow” button.

Follow Influential Twitter Users

They usually have interesting things to say, and will give you stuff to read, content to think about and things to retweet.  You can find a list of power twitter users here (caution, many of these people get pretty geeky).

Step 4: Don’t piss people off

You will piss people off on Twitter if you behave in certain ways.

• Don’t Twitflood.  Twitterers want to be ambiently aware of you.  They don’t want you their face all the time.  No more than 2 twits a minute, and no more than a handful of twits an hour at first.
• Don’t automate your Twits.  Don’t use tools that automatically tell people stuff unless you really know your audience, and you know that they’re OK with it.
• Don’t use more than 2 or 3 @names in one twit.  140 characters isn’t alot of space.  Wasting it by using more than two names probably means you don’t have anything meaningful to say.
• Don’t advertise. You will lose all your followers.  People will get angry at you.
• Don’t ego-twit.  No one cares that you’re so good at this and that.  Talk about things important to others instead.

This is a synthesis of the excellent blog post by Alistair Croll found here.  You should read it.

Step 5: If you’re a company, follow back everyone who follows you

If you’re a company, you’re trying to get an audience.  Do your audience a favor and show them that you care about them and want to listen to them by following them.

Step 6: Did I mention that you should follow Alistair and I?

Alistair is @acroll and I’m @seanpower ;)

Step 7: Now go have fun!

Hopefully, this will help you overcome any of the bumps and bruises that you may encounter along the way to understanding how to effectively use Twitter.  If you have any questions, ask us on Twitter.  More importantly, just go have fun!  Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. twitter suspends legitimate accounts, many related to oreilly; weeping ensues.
2. Web Analytics Association Board of Director Nominee Twitter List