Saturday, September 15, 2012

On Google Intelligence Events


I am using Google Analytics (quite infrequently) to view the activity on this Blog, but for those using websites for commercial purposes, or as a social media vehicle, tracking activity on website is a very valuable tools, especially in our metrics-driven universe. The illustration above which seems as a typical sense and respond cycle is taken from an article in seemingly odd location;   the social media sun recently reported on a feature in Google Analytics called "Google Intelligence Events" (although I think this feature is not new).    The article claimed that this is "a simple feature called complex event processing", falling into the "complex" word trap,  and in other cases it asserts that "Google's intelligence events is only a basic use of event processing engine".
In fact, what this tool is capable of doing is issuing alerts of two types:

Automatic alerts:  indicating significant changes of traffic to the website
Custom alerts:     threshold crossing of a certain indication (e.g. the traffic from Singapore was down 20% from previous day).  This is a threshold over all tracked variables (source, demographics, bounce rate etc..). 

As far as event processing is going -- it is indeed limited capabilities, mainly threshold oriented comparing two set of events (based on time).   However, it shows that event processing has got into the web analytics world and there is a potential of doing more in this space.  More on this -later.    

1 comment:

Adam Justice said...

Hello Opher,

Nice to see you take an interest in our post in regards to Event Processing.

Complex Event Processing is a buzzword when it comes to analytics in the social media niche. I've heard several people use it, but the added word "complex" seems misused in almost every case. I'll often use redundant or canceling descriptors and verbage to stress the facts, in this case that the "Complex Event Processing" is actually quite simple. Which of course, the correct term is event processing for what Google has, but analysts associated with social media will use "Complex Event Processing" as a catch-all term.

With that being said, Social Media Sun was originally developed with specialists like you in mind. I would love to have you as a guest on the site, to introduce Event Processing to our readers, and let people know that there is someone who knows a substantial amount more about the topic than me. Someone to do it right.

Let me know if you're interested. Have a great Weekend!
Adam