Examples of custom alerts

Here are a few valuable examples that will help you get you up and running with custom alerts.

No Visits

This alert will notify you when you have had no visits to your webpage. This could let you know about a broken or misconfigured tracker or JavaScript error on your website.

  • This applies to report Visits Summary
  • Alert me when Visits
  • Condition: Is less than 1

Drop in revenue

To keep track of your store performance, you would want to know when sales have dropped off or increased (for example after making changes to the website or removing products).

Note: this alert compares results to a previous day. Other comparisons include, Same day in previous week and year.

  • This applies to report Ecommerce Orders
  • Alert me when Revenue
  • % decreases more than 10%
  • Compared to previous day (or same day in the previous week)

Form Performance

It would be useful to know if a change in your forms has had an impact on your conversions compared to the previous day or day of week.

  • This applies to Form Overview
  • Alert me when Form conversions
  • % decreases more than 20%
  • Compared to the previous day (or same day in the previous week)

404 Page not found

You don’t want to have any missing pages on your website, so it would be useful to be alerted when a customer accidentally finds a missing page. This alert will only work if you have tagged your 404 pages as explained in this FAQ.

  • This applies to report Page titles
  • When Page Title contains value 404
  • Alert me when Pageviews is greater than 0

Spike in Traffic

This alert will inform you in sudden increase in traffic.

  • This applies to report Visits Summary
  • Alert me when Visits % increases more than 30%
  • Compared to the same day in previous week

Spike in Goal conversions

This alert will inform you when there is a sudden increase in conversions.

  • This applies to report Goals (or you can also select one specific Goal)
  • Alert me when Conversions % increases more than 20%
  • Compared to the same day in the previous week

Drop in Goal conversions

This alert will inform you when there is a sudden decrease in conversions.

  • This applies to report Goals (or you can also select one specific Goal)
  • Alert me when Conversions % decrease more than 20%
  • Compared to the same day in previous week

Increase in email campaign visits

This alert will work if you have tracked your Marketing campaigns and tagged linked using the URL Builder.

  • This applies to report Campaign Sources
  • When Source is email
  • Alert me when Visits increase more than 30%

Target achieved

Let’s say you gave a goal to one of your employee to reach a specific threshold in terms of conversions. You can then define a custom alert in order to inform you when the threshold has been reached.

You can simply do this with an alert saying “Target achieved by Franck” where number of conversions equals the number of actions you defined with him. It takes you only a minute to define something you would have missed otherwise.

Here the actions we can think of are either to congratulate Frank or to ask him what is going wrong if the target is not achieved.
Did you know that you can also take advantage of Matomo premium features to define custom alerts? Let’s see one of them.

Lost SEO ranking

If you are using the Search Engine Keyword Performance premium feature, there are really interesting combinations you can use to create custom alerts.
For example, you can be notified when a specific keyword lost or reached a position:

You will be alerted when your website is losing some positions within the search engine results for specific keywords. Here the action we could take is to investigate why we lost (or gained) a certain position on Google for this keyword.

Events

If you are tracking some events and want to get notified when any event sees an increase/decrease in tracking, you can create custom alerts.
For example if you are tracking a video play event _paq.push(['trackEvent', 'media', 'play', 'play_video', 1]); where « media » is the event category, « play » is the event action, « play_video » is the event name and 1 is the event value and want to be alerted when event_action:play is less than 10.

Note: For events the value comparison is done in following combination Event Category: {event_category} - {event_action}, Event Action: {event_action} - {event_name} and Event Name: {event_name} - {event_action}

There are many custom alert combinations waiting for you out there. Why not giving them a try?

Previous FAQ: Create and manage custom alerts