Features used: Alerts, Dashboards, Error analysis
Time: 20 min.
By setting alerts on metrics for your key pages, CTAs, or flows, you can proactively identify and address areas of frustration and bugs, prioritizing areas of improvement based on their impact on the UX.
Regular alerts
Alerts enables you to receive automatic alerts by following a list of metrics that you tell Contentsquare to monitor.
Set up
1. Click 'Alerts' from the main menu.
2. From the list of alerts you've set, click on 'Set up a new alert' CTA.
3. From the modal that opens, define the context of the alert - perimeter (site, page, or zone), metric, segment you want to monitor and choose the type of alerts you want to create (Manual Alert vs AI alert).
Here are different examples of Alerts you can set up:
- Site:
- Views of error page
- Views of Out of Stock Product Page
- Page:
- Exit rate i.e. checkout
- Load time
- Zone:
- Click recurrence i.e. Checkout next step CTA
Example of the alerts set up for monitoring for bugs
Number of sessions of the '404 Error' page, Exit rate of 'Checkout Step 1' page, Exit rate of 'Checkout Step 1' page, Percentage of sessions of the '404 Error' page, Click recurrence of the 'Place an order' CTA on the 'Checkout - Step 1' page.
Error analysis and Alerts
Set up alerts to receive email notifications whenever there is an unexpected error fluctuation (e.g., in the JS or API errors).
Set up
1. In Segments, create segments based on users experiencing an error on any page or on a specific page or URL.
Here are a couple of examples of simple error segments using the Error condition that you could create:
- A segment of users who have visited any page and experienced any JS error.
- A segment of users who have visited a specific page (e.g. Cart) and experienced a specific JS error.
2. Create Dashboard and Alerts based on these segments.
3. Follow different KPIs on these segments like:
- Number of sessions
- Number of conversions
- Bounce/exit rate
- Time Spent
- Load Time
- E-commerce conversion rate
4. Optional. If you want to set up your alerts from an existing dashboard, go to Dashboards, find your dashboards and left click on thew widget of the KPI you want to be alerted on. From the shortcut menu, select the 'Alerts' option.
Here you can learn how to set up a Dashboards to monitor technical performance
Real time error alerts
Get notified of error rate anomalies on your website by setting up real time alerts. Real time error alerts monitor error rates every 5 minutes, so you can quickly act on anomalies and minimize the impact to your site.
Set up
1. Click 'Alerts' on the main menu.
2. Click 'Set up a new alert' and select 'Error alert'.
3. Set your alert context by deciding to receive alerts based on your site or specific page group performance. The choose from one of the available real time error metrics and then select a type of error related to your metric (JS or API error).
4. Click 'Manual alert' and select your Threshold type:
- % change limit: data will be monitored for a percentage increase, decrease, or both, depending on the limit you set.
- Fixed limit: Data will be monitored to see if it goes over or below the fixed limit you set, for each 5 minute timeframes.
Tip! To select your trigger threshold, use the recommendations provided based on your current data.
5. You can select to be notified by Email or SlackSteps to take after receiving an alert.
Learn more about setting up real time error alerts.
6. To investigate a specific alert, navigate to Alerts and select it from the list. Pay attention to the following:
- Are there any recent spikes in the last few days or hours?
- What is the level of variation? A high variation percentage may indicate unexpected events on your site or page during that time.
Example of an alert set up for monitoring number of JS errors
By looking at the JS errors across the website for all users and devices, a notable surge of approximately 3000% in error occurrences was observed on September 17th. The peak occurred at 18:05 on the 17th, with 30 errors detected.
Steps to take after receiving an alert
For example: “The number of sessions on the page “Errors” has increased by 35.4% on the segment “All visitors” on Mobile.”
- In the Journey Analysis, use the Reverse Journey: Journeys Before a Page, to understand how users are reaching the Errors page.
- Use the Journeys After a Page to understand the impact of users reaching an exit page. Are users exiting or are they continuing to navigate?
- After you identify the page leading to errors, use that page in Zoning Analysis and/or Session Replay to find the exact element causing the issue.
Go further
Look at these Help center articles to understand how to monitor key KPIs using Alerts and Dashboards or explore various methods for tracking your site's technical performance.