Adobe Analytics should take holidays into account when firing off alerts.
Currently, an alert looks at activity over the recent past (30, 60, 90 days) and based on what's predicted, decides if a change in activity is an anomaly. This all makes perfect sense, except for some incredibly predictable days, like New Year's, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
Adobe should offer a setting that takes into account national holidays.
- A checkbox would enable holiday logic to be put into place
- The admin would choose from a list of countries whose holidays should be taken into account
- Only traffic from those countries would be counted for these holidays
- When reviewing traffic and determining if an anomaly has occurred, the lookback period will take into account the prior year's traffic around that holiday and see if it is within a similar trendline
- If it is, no alert will fire
- If the traffic is outside the expected trendline by the chosen criteria, an alert will fire
Alerts are high stress events. Seeing one after every holiday reduces the urgency of them, and should an actual anomaly occur, it will likely be ignored. This will increase the utility of alerts overall.
