Insight Rocket Dynamic Alert

Introduction

Insight Rocket Dynamic Alert is a new concept in web analytics. While all current analytics products provide a multitude of reports, they do not provide any insight into which report needs to be reviewed on a given day. Dynamic Alert provides that insight, along with a dynamic trend analysis feature that shows the behavior of the traffic before it generated an alert.In the current version of Dynamic Alert a user would be able to focus on the significant elements of their web site

How Dynamic Alert Works

Email Alerts

The basic function of Dynamic Alert is to provide emails to selected users when the activity in a profile goes past a threshold in either direction. The email contains a list of the measures that exceeded their trends by an amount defined as the 'Sensitivity' in the User interface. This sensitivity setting allows you to determine the volume of alerts that would be generated for any particular day. Email addresses, profiles, reports and sensitivity levels can be adjusted for the selected alerts, allowing you to designate different people to receive the alerts for different reports.

User Interface

The user interface to Dynamic Alert provide access to define the sensitivity levels and alerts for different individuals as well as providing a way to view the alerts generated over time and the trend of a particular measure over time. This will allow you to further refine the reporting for your alerts and review the volatility of a specific measure.

Login

The link in the email leads you to alert.insightrocket.com and the login screen. You will be assigned a login id, password and account name from Insight Rocket. Use that to log into Dynamic Alert. Your login will time out after 30 minutes if you have no activity and will return you to the login page.

Navigation Bar

Once logged in you will see the main Dynamic Alert page. This provides a calendar on the upper left corner and a set of buttons down the left side. You can select a day, week or month from the calendar and the alerts captured for that period under the selected sensitivity level will display shortly. You can change the sensitivity level and get new alerts at any time.

Once the alerts are listed you will also see a set of checkboxes on the left bar associated with the reports and report groupings displayed. By default all alerts are selected, but you can deselect specific tables to focus in on the alerts you want to track.

At the bottom of the navigation bar you can select the 'Email Alerts' button to configure the Email destinations and selections from the user interface. This will replace the listing of alerts with an email configuration screen that you can use to create new email recipients.

Alert List

When you select a period from the calendar for which there are alerts, which includes all days up to the day before the current day, all weeks up to the previous week, and all months up to the previous month, the alerts that exceed the current sensitivity level will be displayed on the main content part of the page. This list shows ten alerts at a time and allows you to page forwards or backwards through all the alerts. Each alert is identified by the report suite or profile, report name, element or dimension name and value, and the metric or measure name for the value that generated the alert. The alert is shown both as the percentage of the measured values and where appropriate as the actual number associated with the measurement. Along with the actual metric we provide the trend and the change factor to show how much the alert exceeded the trend. We also use arrows to show if whether the alert broke through the trend upwards or downwards.

Each of the columns in the alert list is sortable by clicking on the heading for the column. The default sort is alphabetic based on the report grouping and report.

The rows contain a link to the Web Analytics Vendor login and depending on the access provided by the vendor you may be able to quickly get to the report that included the alert. If your account has been provisioned for this option, you will be be able to click through to your vendor, generating a new window and only have to specify the username and password assigned to that account. Clicking anywhere on the row (including on this link) will insert the trend graph for the measure above the alerts.

Graphing

The rows are clickable and a single click will bring up a trend graph with the threshold boundaries above the list of alerts. This can show how volatile a specific measure is over time. The graph shows the dates covering the analysis period and the measurement values where the selected dimension value was present. Some dimensions may not exist for all the dates within a period such as specific search terms or referrers. In this case the date will be shown on the calendar without any value in the graph.

Email Configuration

The “Email Alert” button on the main page replaces the alert list with a configuration screen that allows you to create, delete, and modify the target, sensitivity, profile, report and period for any emailed alerts. Clicking on 'New' or 'Update' after an email has been selected will bring up a form you can update and submit with the changes to the alert. This form will allow you to select the profile, report, period and sensitivity of the email from dropdown lists and allows free-form insertion of the email address. This form only allows a single email for each alert so you would have to duplicate the alert to get the same threshold alerts sent to different destinations.

Using Dynamic Alert with your Web Analytics Vendor

Requirements for integration

Dynamic Alert is presently a value-add extension to several Web Analytics providers and is available as a service. It uses the analytics data available through the API and therefore needs the analytics data accessible over the Internet or a private network. Each day the Dynamic Alert servers analyze the reports in the selected reports and generate trends for all the metrics in the reports. This can take several hours depending on the number of rows in a report.

When the analysis is complete, all metrics that break through the trend according to the sensitivity setting and have an underlying value greater than the base level are included in an email sent to the designated addresses. The same data is available from the Dynamic Alert website and on that site is extended with the ability to graph the trends for each alert.

Adding Reports and report groups

Insight Rocket will add other reports to the set of reports to be monitored for alerts. When you add a group of reports bundled into a profile or report suite the alerts can begin in a few hours, but it will take about another week to build the history for graphing the alerts.

Adding reports is a two step process and must be coordinated with Insight Rocket. Simply adding a new report to the report suite or profile used for Dynamic Alert will not cause it to be captured, but once Insight Rocket adds it to the Dynamic Alert system, it will start reporting the next day. It will take longer for the graphs to show the trends over time for alerts generated from that report, but they will be available in a few days from adding the new report.

Adding Users

Insight Rocket will add users to the web interface. It is not necessary to include a user in the web interface to send an email to them so this can be reserved for people who need to view the trend graphs or administer the system.