Traffic alerts
Clickport sends traffic alerts by email. Automatic alerts compare recent traffic with your site's history. With alert rules, you choose the visitor count yourself. Set both under Site settings → Email reports for each site.
What an alert looks like
Alerts show the visitor count and the reason for the email. Spike emails also include the measured hour and a chart. The button opens the dashboard directly. This example shows an automatic spike alert.
|
Clickport Analytics marlow.store More visitors in one hour
The expectation includes normal weekday patterns and recent growth. Visitors in each 15-minute period
A visitor can appear in more than one period. The hourly count removes these repeats. Largest measured increases
Source
Page These counts are saved when the alert starts. Later traffic does not change them. Open dashboard Opens the full day for 2026-09-06. One email per ongoing increase. Manage spike alerts in your site settings. |
Automatic spike alerts
Clickport checks the last completed hour every 15 minutes. It allows three minutes for incoming data. Expected visitors come from the same weekday and local hour in previous weeks. The comparison also adjusts for recent growth.
An increase must pass all three checks:
- The hour has at least 25 visitors. The count is at least three times the expectation and at least 20 visitors above it.
- The last 30 minutes have at least 10 visitors and at least twice the expected count for those 30 minutes.
- Clickport has enough complete history and confirms that data collection works correctly.
For example, 90 visitors in an hour can qualify when 30 are expected. The other checks must also pass. Several days of higher traffic raise the expectation, so normal growth alone does not keep producing alerts.
What the spike email contains
- The exact hour and the site's timezone.
- The visitor count and the expected count, adjusted for weekday patterns and recent growth.
- Four bars with visitor counts for each 15-minute period.
- The source and page with the largest measured increases, when those details are available.
- An Open dashboard button for the full day when the measured hour starts.
The email keeps the counts recorded when the alert starts. Later traffic does not change these counts. The dashboard shows the full day, so its total can differ from the email's hour.
When another spike email can arrive
Clickport sends one email per ongoing increase. It requires at least 24 hours of observed normal traffic before a new increase can produce another email. Midnight does not reset this rule.
Sites need several weeks of complete Clickport history. Clickport uses existing history when monitoring starts. The first valid check records the current traffic without sending an email. An increase already in progress therefore does not produce an initial alert.
Incomplete history or uncertain data collection keeps spike alerts silent. After missing observations, Clickport checks the current traffic again before looking for a new increase.
Automatic drop alerts
The inverse: an email when a normally active site records zero visitors for 12 hours. The baseline is weekday-and-time-of-day aware, so a site that is always quiet overnight or on Sundays never false-alarms; the alert only fires when this exact window usually sees at least 5 visitors.
In practice a flatline rarely means a quiet day. It usually means the tracker stopped firing: a redesign or deploy dropped the snippet, or a plugin started blocking it. The email says so and links straight to your tracker status and the troubleshooting guide. At most one alert per day, with a three-day pause before it reminds you again.
Alert rules: your own numbers
Automatic alerts use your history to detect unusual traffic. Alert rules use a fixed visitor count that you choose. Each rule can apply to all traffic or one channel:
- Above rules check today's count and email at most once a day. The email arrives within the hour of your number being crossed.
- Below rules check the last 24 hours and email once when the number is crossed, then stay quiet until traffic recovers. No daily nagging while a slow week plays out. A weekdays only option keeps normal weekend dips from firing it.
- Up to five rules per site. Rules and the automatic alerts run side by side; turning one off doesn't affect the other.
Three ways people use alert rules
Running paid campaigns
Paid Social goes above 150. You launched ads and want to know the moment they take off, without refreshing the dashboard all morning. The email arrives when your number is crossed, names the count, and opens the dashboard filtered to that channel. Works the same for Paid Search alongside it.
Guarding your search traffic
Organic Search falls below 50, weekdays only. A quiet early-warning for ranking drops: if a search update or a technical problem cuts your organic traffic, you hear about it within hours, not when the monthly report lands. It emails once and re-arms only after recovery, so a rough patch doesn't flood your inbox.
Launch day
All traffic goes above 500. You posted the launch, closed the laptop, and want the good news pushed to you. When the wave arrives, the email tells you, and the dashboard button drops you into the realtime view to watch it live.
Good to know
- Alert emails go to the site owner, like everything else email-related.
- Plain HTML, no tracking pixels and no remote images. We cannot see whether you opened them, by design.
- All counts exclude the bot traffic Clickport filters (see Bot Management).
- The weekly and monthly digests are separate: read about them on Email reports.