Create and manage custom alerts

Custom alerts keep you up to date with what is happening on your site without having to check your data every day. With Custom Alerts, you can configure any report to alert you when certain conditions are or aren’t met.

Are you using Matomo On-Premise or Matomo for WordPress? To get started, make sure the free CustomAlerts plugin is installed in your Matomo. Using Matomo Cloud? This feature is activated for you automatically.

Managing your Custom Alerts

To manage your Custom Alerts:

1. Click on « Administration » (⚙️ gear icon top right)
2. Click on « Alerts » under « Personal » in the left menu
   
   You will be able to « Create New alert », « Edit » or « Delete » the existing Alerts in this page.

Creating an alert

To create a Custom Alert:

1. Click on « Administration » (⚙️ gear icon top right)
2. Click on « Alerts » under « Personal » in the left menu
3. Click on « Create New Alert »
4. Choose a name for your Alert
   
5. Choose a Website from the dropdown under « Apply To »
   
   Note: a custom alert is active for one website
6. Choose the period for when any alert conditions should be checked (alert condition will be checked around midnight on the period of your selection)
   Available periods to choose from:
   a. Day – Sent every day around midnight
   b. Week – Sent every Monday around midnight
   c. Month – Sent every 1st of the month around midnight
   
7. Choose the recipient of the Custom Alert, this can email or SMS. Phone numbers will only be listed if you have configured SMS gateway
   
8. Choose the report under « Alert Condition » you would like to monitor
   
9. Click on « Save »

Things to know about Alert Condition

Alert Condition section is considered to be one of the important sections of Custom Alert configuration, where a report which needs to monitored can be specified. There are more than 70 reports to choose from (see our Analytics terms glossary for the complete list of reports).

List of Operators

• matches any (if you choose this, the “Alert me when” conditions will be checked against all rows of your report)
• is
• is not
• matches regular expression
• does not match regular expression
• contains
• does not contain
• starts with
• does not start with
• ends with
• does not end with

Using these operators you can choose to be alerted depending on the label of a specific row of your report. The value lets you define which row’s label you want to monitor in the report.

For example, if the title of your homepage is Home and you want to be alerted when your Homepage goes above or below a certain value (or increases or decreases by a certain value), you would select when Page Title is “Home”.

Another example: if you wanted to be alerted whenever smartphone usage dropped or increased after an update, you would select: this applies to report Device type, When Device type is Smartphone, Alert me when Visits % increases more than 10% (compared to the same day in the previous week).

Things to know about Alert me when

In this section you specify which metric should be monitored and what change in this metric will trigger your custom alert. The available metrics will change depending on the report selected in “This applies to report”.

List of available Operators:

• is less than
• is greater than
• decreases more than
• increases more than
• % decreases more than
• % increases more than

For example, when Page Title is “Home” we select the Pageviews as a metric. We can now select an operator for the amount of pageviews to trigger the alert.