Setting Up A Traffic Alert

[joew38481565]

I've been trying to set up a basic traffic alert using the Alert Builder.   I want to check daily visits to see if they drop below a certain threshold,    I only want to look at Mon-Fri since the traffic normally drops to very low levels on the weekend.  I'm having difficulty getting the filter to work so that it ignores the weekend traffic.   Has anyone had issues with this?

Thanks !

[Pablo_Childe]

Here is a screen grab. basically setup for each desired day, threshold, use or in between the days. Should not fire on weekends now.

GLTU

[joew38481565]

I added the 'or' statement so I could have a filter for each weekday (partial screenshot below).   The counter in the top corner says that the alert would have been triggered 30 times in the last 30 days.  When I looked at the actual daily visits the only days where the the visits were less than 100 were on the weekends...so it really shouldn't have been triggered at all over that last 30 days.  Not sure why this would be.

[Pablo_Childe]

Your TRAC visits segment now is based on metrics that are causing it to qualify for rule to fire.

What is the segment made up of?

[joew38481565]

It was set up to look for certain pages in the report suite (page...contains...).   The metric selected to show was visits.  Is that the problem?

Thanks for the help.

[Pablo_Childe]

Yes. A visit based metric will include extra pages outside of the desired targeted ones. Make a copy of segment and use hit based for just the pages you need. this will eliminate extra pages. (I assume the event occurs on the pages) you are targeting.

[joew38481565]

I created another segment based on hits for the targeted pages but the preview still says the alert would fire every day (30 times over the last 30 days).  When I remove the day filters then the preview says it would fire on 9 days out of the last 30 which is correct since there were 9 weekend days where daily visits were below 100.   However, I'd rather just have the alert based on weekdays so I wouldn't be getting alerts sent to me every week because of expected lower Saturday and Sunday traffic.     

[Pablo_Childe]

ok then build all logic in segment. Like screen grab adjust to your scenario: You will need to use containers.

[joew38481565]

I created a segment that filters out the weekend days.  Still didn't work....seems like there is no linkage between the metrics trigger and the additional dimension/segments filters.   Strange....the only thing that adjusted the alert getting triggered in the preview was adjusting the metrics trigger number (either up or down).   Adding dimensions/segment filters (like day of the week) didn't seem to result in what you would expect.  It actually added more days where the alert trigger would fire.   

[Pablo_Childe]

What if trigger KPI was page views? The visits being session based might be throwing things off here..

I have for sure used pageviews as well as custom events to trigger warnings successfully.

[joew38481565]

I changed the trigger metric to pageviews (< 500) which correctly identified 9 days (weekend days) where the alert would get triggered.  However, when I added the day of the week filter (for Monday), the preview stated that the alert would get triggered 25 times over 30 days.   It looks like the day of the week dimension filter works differently than expected.  Really bizarre.....setting up a simple alert shouldn't be this difficult.

[Pablo_Childe]

Try specifying the day of week with your Trac segment not in Alerts segment maker.

[joew38481565]

I gave that a go and the weekend data is still triggering an alert (the preview states 8 times over the last 30 days).   Seems like there is no way to filter out the weekends from the alert trigger.  I'll continue trying some other things as time permits.   Seems like this should be a simple task...can't believe that this is not more intuitive.  Thanks for your input.

[Gigazelle · Accepted solution]

Since the segment is effectively setting weekend data to zero (weekend data is segmented out), it's firing the alert. There are two ways around this:

• Create an alert using a calculated metric with an if/then statement. If weekday/weekend equals weekend, then use the manual number of 101; else use the visits metric. Weekend numbers would always avoid triggering the alert, since they would always report 101 (above your 100 threshold). This would not affect any reports; only this specific calculated metric which would only be used in context of alerts.
• Another way to accomplish this would be to set 5 weekly alerts, one for each weekday.

Either one should work, it just depends on which would make sense to you and/or your organization.