Customize Alert Text

[#1]

SiteCatalyst has an "Alerts" feature that allows users, based on a metric exceeding a specific point, to send alerts via email to various people.

This would be perfect for monitoring errors on the site (404/Page Not Found). I set up an alert this week to try it out, but was disappointed that there's no option to include any text with the email. It comes across as a cryptic message from SC with an attachment. We should be able to customize the message for any Alert we create, e.g. "Omniture has detected a large number of 404 errors on [site name]. You can investigate further by logging and reviewing the Pages Not Found report inside SiteCatalyst.")

[#2]

Thanks for this idea, Christopher. These are both great points. I'm going to discuss them with the SiteCatalyst development team. You or anyone else should feel free to share any other ideas for improving alerts here.

[#3]

I think that this one is desperately needed. 

I would like to add to #2 that one of the options should be to include some of the top values that set off the alert. For instance, if your alert is for pages that contain "error", then you should be able to include the top X pages that contain "error", including the alert metric used such as page views. 

[#4]

Thank you for your input on this.

[#5]

Taking #2 to the next step, I would like to be able to receive alerts identifying indiviual pages/products of the whole. "Of all your pages/items, these ones changed per the % or # specified."

Currently, alerts are for everything or specified individuals. This does not help me identify when a page/photo/product receives a major shift in traffic/sales (unless I create an alert for every page).

[#6]

There are multiple posts about improving alerts, so hopefully a robust set of improvements will come about soon. Hopefully, I'm not posting any duplicate suggestions. My ideas:

1) If very specfic time/date filtering can't be added, at least give us the ability to toggle by day of week or weekend vs weekday. I've held off on several alerts b/c of all the false positives that will be generated by the drop in various metrics come the weekend

2) Have the alert trigger once the threshhold is reached within the specified time period rather than waiting til the end of the time period to send (maybe this is already set and there's just a report lag on my end?)

3) Allow for alerts on specific values within reports. Sometimes, I just care about a specfic value(s) within a report.

[#7]

A few things to add:

1.  Sharing alerts would be nice

2. Abiility to add alerts to calculated metrics. We need to be able to remove the daily flucuations or seasonal flucuations from the equation.

3. Alerts comparing data against this same time last week - accomplishes #2 in a different way.

[#8]

echoing sajc's suggestion about weekday/weekend. I have alerts set up based on weekday numbers and so i get alerts every weekend.