📘 This article provides information on how to create custom alerts in AlertPanel. AlertPanel is part of Botify's Intelligence Suite, available with a Botify Pro or Enterprise plan.
Overview
In addition to the default alerts in AlertPanel, you can create custom alerts based on the data available in Botify’s SiteCrawler. Custom alerts offer more flexibility in AlertPanel, allowing you to set up alerts at the URL level to monitor dimensions and metrics for campaigns and initiatives specific to your organization.
Benefits of Custom Alerts
For employees of enterprise sites, it can be challenging to monitor and assess the SEO impact of every update to a site. AlertPanel’s custom alerts safeguard and protect your site traffic by alerting key stakeholders to sudden changes, enabling the relevant teams to respond promptly and avoid unnecessary SEO issues.
How Custom Alerts Work
Based on the dimensions and metrics of your custom alert, AlertPanel will alert you when the number of URLs that match your criteria increases or decreases significantly compared to its baseline. For example, to track a change in organic traffic, you could create an alert looking at the number of Active pages (Organic Visits within the past 30 days), instead of defining a threshold for the number of visits.
When Custom Alerts are Triggered
Botify performs two separate crawls of your site:
The daily AlertPanel crawl monitors your site’s Robots.txt and the strategic URLs you define in the AlertPanel settings.
The regular crawl of your site by SiteCrawler.
Custom Alert triggers are triggered at the end of each regular crawl of your site, not the AlertPanel crawl. At the end of each regular crawl, Botify will review the crawl to see which custom alerts are above or below their baseline levels and report any statistically significant shifts.
Creating a Custom Alert
You create custom alerts in the SiteCrawler URL Explorer, which is linked from AlertPanel.
To create a custom alert:
Navigate to Intelligence > AlertPanel > Overview.
Click the Create Alert link to be directed to the SiteCrawler URL Explorer.
Select the filters to define the parameters of your custom alert. Choose any of the available dimensions and metrics in URL Explorer to monitor any rises or drops in performance based on these parameters.
Click the Create alert link in the middle of the page to define your custom alert settings.
Define the alert settings, referring to the Custom Alert Settings section below, and then click Create.
Custom Alert Settings
The following settings define your custom alert:
Alert name: This name will be displayed for alerts in AlertPanel and sent by email, Slack, or MS Teams.
Description: Optional description of the custom alert's function.
Alert Group: The name of the Alert Groups to which the new custom alert will belong. By default, the alert will be added to the “Custom alerts based on SiteCrawler analysis” group.
For the pages: The filters on which the custom alert is based. To edit this filter, return to the URL Explorer.
I want to: Alerts will be triggered if Botify detects a critical movement of the pages in the filters applied. It is worth considering if you want to activate an alert based on a detected rise or drop. You may want to create two separate custom alerts based on the same set of URL filters, with one alert monitoring a rise and one monitoring a drop. For example, detect if there is a sudden rise in URLs marked with Canonical Points to Self = No; or if there is a sudden drop in URLs marked with Is Indexable = Yes.
On: Select if you want to watch all pages in the filters you defined or only active pages. Active pages have received visits from search engines and may have more business value since they are consumer-facing.
👉 “Only Active Pages” can only be selected if your project has connected an analytics account to Botify such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics.
FAQ
Why is the custom alert button greyed out?
Why is the custom alert button greyed out?
The custom alert button will be greyed out if you do not have Admin privileges for the project. Only Admins can create and edit custom alerts. Additionally, you cannot create custom alerts when the project is an ad-hoc crawl since Botify needs recurrent crawls to document changes at scale.
Who can see and edit my custom alerts?
Who can see and edit my custom alerts?
All users can view custom alerts in the AlertPanel Manage Alerts & Groups tab. Only Admin users can create, edit, and delete alerts. Additionally, users enlisted for email notifications and those with access to your AlertPanel Slack channel or MS Teams can see alerts.
How many custom alerts can I create?
How many custom alerts can I create?
Users can create up to 10 custom alerts per project on a Pro plan. For Enterprise plans, users can create up to 100 custom alerts. Monitoring the same metric for a “Rise” or “Drop” counts as two separate alerts. Deactivated (muted) alerts count toward your custom alert total.
Read next: