Creating Alerts

Alerts can simply be created by clicking the Add Alert button. From here, you will be presented with the above menu. You can give the alert a name before selecting the Scope of the Alert, which can be set to Session or Pageview-based. When selecting Pageview, you will be presented with the option to search for the page in question that you want the alert to trigger for.

Additionally, you can select a Segment also to be applied to the alert, for example if you only wanted this alert to fire specifically for US visitors, or mobile visitors etc. before selecting Threshold or Deviation. 

Threshold refers to a defined value, while deviation refers to if the average level of a metric changes by a specified amount compared to previous averages.

For example, if you wanted to create an alert that triggered if the bounce rate went above 50%, you would select Bounce Rate from the criteria, Threshold, Is more than and then set the trigger level to 50%, as shown in the image above.

If you wanted to look at if a metric increased by 10% higher than usual, you would select Deviation instead of Threshold.

Once happy with your alert, you can simply click Add Alert. You will now need to subscribe to the alert, or add relevant users to be subscribed to it. More information on subscribing to Alerts can be found here.

Criteria

Some of the metrics that you can use in Criteria can be seen below:

• Bounce rate - The percentage of users defined as bouncing from the property.
• Duration - The average amount of time the user spent on the website.
• Focus time - The average focus time of the session (time that the website was in focus i.e. user wasn’t looking at other tabs or other programs).
• Goals - The average number of goals achieved in the session.
• HTTP Error rate - The percentage of users receiving HTTP errors (404, 501 etc.). This will need to be configured using the sendHTTPerror call, which you can find more information about here.
• JavaScript error rate - The percentage of users experiencing JavaScript errors on the property.
• Pageviews - The average number of pages viewed per session.
• Total Sessions - The total number of Sessions. You can then choose a Segment in the For Segment dropdown to use with this metric, which means you can trigger alerts based on Segment criteria, such as application errors.
• Value - The average value achieved during sessions. This can be configured using goals.
• Wait time - The average wait time users encounter when using the website.