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Getting Started - Analytics

Traffic Spike Alerts

Last updated: 17th June, 2021

⚠️ Traffic alerts provide you with automatic notifications should your traffic drop below a certain level or you receive a sudden traffic spike. This feature is particularly useful for ensuring you are instantly notified if something is causing your traffic to dramatically dip or react if you are experiencing extreme interest.

How do notifications help me?

Notifications are one of the best ways to keep on top of sudden fluctuations in traffic to your site. By focusing on traffic levels, GoSquared can often alert you of issues quicker than server-side performance alerting, meaning you can be prepared for the best and the worst that website visitors will throw at you.

Sent out a particularly successful email campaign? Justin Bieber talking about you on Twitter? Running a TV advertisement in an unexpectedly popular show? GoSquared will notify you immediately wherever you are.

1. Add an email address to your list of integrations

In GoSquared, different integrations can receive different notifications. To send notifications to a specific email address (including your own), you must first add it as an email 'integration' by navigating to Settings > Current Project > Integrations > Email.

Email is just one of the many integrations that GoSquared can send notifications to. GoSquared can also notify integrations such as Slack, Zapier, or webhooks.

Project Settings - Notifications

  • Email alerts – give a snapshot of what the traffic on your site looks like at the time of the alert being triggered. Add more recipients for email alerts here.
  • Slack alerts – post the number of visitors currently online with a link back to your Now dashboard. See our Slack integration for details of how to configure alerts in Slack.
  • Webhook alerts – post a JSON payload to a custom HTTP endpoint of your choosing. Read more about webhooks

2. Choose when to be notified – traffic threshold for a spike/dip

To set a traffic alert, sign in to your GoSquared account. If you manage more than one site, make sure you have selected the project you wish to set up notifications for.

Select Settings > Current Project > Notifications in the sidebar.

Navigate to Setting > Current Project > Notifications. From there you can create 3 types of alert.

  • Traffic spike – when you have more than a defined number of concurrent visitors online.
  • Traffic dip – when you have less than a defined number of concurrent visitors online.
  • Smart Group Enter/Exit – if you have Contacts set up you can alert when somebody matches or un-matches your filter in a Smart Group.

We call these triggers and you can set them to a level appropriate for your site's traffic.


How often will I be notified?

The first time your site crosses your visitor threshold – we'll notify you immediately. However we'll then wait an hour before notifying you of that same threshold again.

Why wait an hour?
Imagine you've setup a traffic spike threshold of 100 visitors. If your site keeps bouncing between 99/100/101 visitors, you would flip-flop across the threshold constantly. To prevent this from generating non stop notifications, we limit how often you can be notified. We'll always notify you immediately when the threshold is first crossed. After this we'll put that specific notification trigger on a 1 hour cool-down.