Major updates to alerts, goals, and spy

August 9, 2011

We've been working on a gigantic update to alerts, goals, and spy, and here it finally is. The most major update is to alerts, so we're pulling that out of the blackhole that is your site preferences and putting it front and center.

So what's new? Here's what the alert setup page looks like now, which should give you a nice overview of everything that's new:

Let's start with the new ways to be notified: Desktop, Sound, and ClickyTouch (our official unofficial iOS app). These are in addition to the previous methods, which are Email and Twitter. Any alert you setup can use any combination of these 5 methods, including all of them, so it would be pretty much impossible to miss an alert if you set it up right!

In addition to these new methods of being alerted, we've added two new types of alerts:

I want to talk more about desktop and sound alerts for a minute. To be clear, since these are integrated into the web site itself, these only work when you have our web site open. But if you're anything like us, that's pretty much 24x7, so no biggie, right?

Depending on how many alerts are queued up to show you, they are visible for either 6 seconds or 10 seconds. We only do one at a time though, so as long as there are less than 6 queued up (and 99% of the time, that should be the case, unless you are insane), then they'll be displayed for 10 seconds.

When you are viewing reports for just one specific site (e.g. whenever you're inside the /stats/ directory), you will only receive alerts for that specific site. But if you are anywhere else on the site — user homepage, help, contact, etc — then alerts for ALL of your sites will be active. And in this case, we append the site's name to the end of the alert title, so you know what site it's for:

Goals

We cleaned up the goal setup page quite a bit, so only the basic options that most of you need are up top, with the rest in the "advanced" section. We now allow "global" wildcards, meaning the entire goal can be just a wildcard. In this case, ANY page view will trigger the goal. You can do the same thing with funnels, as well as search and referrer alerts.

You can also see that we've added a shortcut to create an alert for a goal after you've saved it. This takes you to the alert setup page, with the alert name prepopulated to match the goal name, and the "goal" alert type with the proper goal preselected.

Spy

We spent a LOT of time integrating all of this new alerting into Spy as well. Not many of you know this but Spy is essentially a completely different "product" from the rest of Clicky. It is a true live stream of people browsing your site, whereas the rest of your reports are updated once per minute in batches using this same data. So, to make sure the alerts in Spy were triggered at the exact same time you see a visitor performing something in Spy that should trigger an alert, we had to write another entirely new version of the whole alerting system in Javascript — just for Spy.

We thought it would be quite nice to actually highlight the goals in Spy as well. As you can see here, the row is highlighted, and the goal icon you chose is on the right hand side:

Desktop and sound alerts work the exact same way here as they do in the rest of Clicky.

What about Bigscreen?

You don't think we'd leave one of our newest most popular features high and dry, do you? That's right, alerts even work in Bigscreen, as you can see below. We made the fonts extra big so you could read them from afar. The alert visible here is the new "new visitor" alert mentioned above.

We've tested this very thoroughly but we do expect there to be some minor bugs, especially with the Spy stuff. So let us know if something doesn't work like you expect it to.

Last, when creating alerts, there's up to a 30 minute delay before they are fully active within the system, so be patient — and enjoy!

Update

Yes, there were some bugs. Just pushed an update that fixes them. Changes:

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