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

matomo custom alert for no visits

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)

matomo custom alert for revenue drop

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)

matomo custom alert for forms

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

matomo custom alert page not found

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

matomo custom alert for traffic spike

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

matomo custom alert for goals spike

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

matomo custom alert goals drop

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%

matomo custom alert for campaign increase

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 Frank” 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.

matomo custom alert target achieved

Here the actions we can think of are either to congratulate Frank or to ask them why the target was not achieved.

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:

matomo custom alert lost seo ranking

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.

matomo custom alert for events

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}

Hits Consumption

Creating an alert to track hits consumption can help monitor website activity and manage data usage in Matomo. Since Hits include all tracking interactions, such as pageviews, events, and downloads, setting up Custom Alerts can help detect unusual traffic spikes, decreases, or threshold breaches.

Hits is not available as a built-in metric for alerts, so you first need to create a Custom Report as an Evolution report using the Hits metric. Once set up, you can use this report to configure an alert with a defined threshold.

  • This applies to a custom Evolution report based on Hits.
  • Alert me when Hits
  • Alert me when Hits increase more than 50%

matomo custom alert for hits

Once the alert is active, Matomo will monitor Hits in the Custom Report and send notifications if the defined conditions are met. You can adjust alert thresholds at any time by editing the alert settings or you can set multiple alerts for different Hit thresholds.

There are many possible custom alert combinations you can create to monitor the metrics that matter most to you!

Previous FAQ: Create and manage Custom Alerts