How to Set Up Custom Alerts in Google Analytics

Catching a huge traffic spike or a sudden drop in sales the moment it happens is a potential game-changer. Instead of uncovering an issue days after the fact, custom alerts let you know there’s something you need to look at - good or bad - in near real-time. This article will show you exactly how to set up custom alerts in Google Analytics 4 to save time, react faster, and keep a constant pulse on your website’s performance.

Why You Should Be Using Custom Alerts in Google Analytics

If you aren’t using custom alerts yet, you're likely stuck in a reactive cycle of discovering problems long after they’ve started. You might run a weekly report on Monday only to find out your checkout page was broken all weekend, costing you unknown amounts of revenue. Custom alerts flip that script, turning your analytics into a proactive monitoring system.

Here’s why they are so valuable:

• Instant Problem-Solving: Get an email the moment your traffic unexpectedly plummets to zero. This isn’t a mystery to solve next week, it’s an immediate signal that your tracking code might be broken or your site could be down.
• Spotting Opportunities: Did a blog post just go viral on social media? An alert for a sudden spike in traffic to a specific URL lets you jump on the opportunity. You can amplify the post, add a stronger call-to-action, or build on the momentum before it fades.
• Performance Peace of Mind: Instead of manually logging into Google Analytics every few hours just to check if "everything is okay," you can trust that your alerts will notify you if anything goes haywire. This frees you up to focus on strategy instead of constant fire-watching.
• Campaign Monitoring: Launch a new ad campaign? Set up an alert to notify you if conversions from that campaign drop below a certain threshold, so you can investigate and optimize before wasting more of your budget.

In short, custom alerts act as your 24/7 analytics watchdog. They automate the process of spotting significant changes, allowing you to be the first to know when something deserves your attention.

Setting Up Custom Alerts in Google Analytics 4

If you're used to Universal Analytics, you'll notice things have changed a bit. Google Analytics 4 has renamed "Custom Alerts" to <strong>Custom Insights</strong>, and the system is more deeply integrated with AI-powered anomaly detection. Don't let the new name fool you, the core function is the same: automatically notifying you of important data changes.

Here’s how to create your first custom alert (insight) in GA4, step-by-step.

1. Navigate to the Insights Dashboard

From your main GA4 reporting home page, you'll see a card titled Insights & recommendations. This area provides automatically generated findings from Google's AI. To create your own, click "View all insights" at the bottom of this card.

On the next screen, click the "Create" button in the top right corner.

2. Create an Insight from Scratch

You’ll now see a choice to use one of GA4's suggested alert templates or to start from scratch. We’ll choose "Create new" to walk through the entire process and understand all the settings.

Step 1: Set the Evaluation Frequency

This is where you decide how often GA4 should check your data to see if the alert condition has been met.

• Hourly: Best for mission-critical metrics like "is traffic zero?". The moment an hour passes with no sessions, you'll get notified.
• Daily: The most common and useful frequency. This works perfectly for tracking changes in daily revenue, conversions, user sessions, or pageviews.
• Weekly: Good for higher-level trend analysis, like a consistent week-over-week drop in organic traffic.
• Monthly: Used for summarizing long-term performance shifts.

Step 2: Choose Your Segment

By default, the alert will apply to "All Users." However, you can make your alerts much more targeted by selecting a specific segment. For instance, you could create an alert that only triggers based on the behavior of Mobile Traffic or Organic Traffic.

For now, you can leave this set to "All Users" to create a site-wide alert.

Step 3: Define the Condition

This is the "if-then" logic for your alert. It consists of three parts:

1. Metric: The data point you want to monitor. You can choose from nearly any metric in GA4, like Sessions, Ecommerce revenue, Views, Conversions, or Total users.
2. Operator: The rule that needs to be met. Options include:
3. Value: The number or percentage threshold for your rule. For example, if you choose "% decreases by more than," you might set the value to 20 to get an alert for a 20% drop.

Step 4: Name Your Insight & Manage Notifications

Give your alert a clear and descriptive name like "Alert - Daily Revenue Drop > 25%" so you know exactly what it is when you receive an email.

Under Manage notifications, you can enter the email addresses of anyone who should receive the alert when it's triggered. You can add one or multiple emails here.

Final Step: Create Your Alert

Double-check all your settings and click "Create" in the top right corner. That's it! Your new custom alert is now active and will monitor your data according to the schedule you set.

5 Must-Have Google Analytics Alerts for Marketers and Business Owners

Ready to get started? Here are five practical examples of custom alerts you can set up in your GA4 account today.

1. The "Is the Site Down?" Alert

This is the most critical alert for any website. It tells you immediately if traffic has flat-lined, which usually points to a broken tracking code, server downtime, or another technical catastrophe.

• Objective: Get notified instantly if the site stops recording traffic.
• Evaluation Frequency: Hourly
• Segment: All Users
• Condition: Metric = Sessions | Operator = Is less than or equal to | Value = 1
• Name: CRITICAL - NO SITE TRAFFIC

2. The "Sales Have Stopped" Alert

For any e-commerce business, a sudden halt in revenue is a flashing red light. This could indicate a problem with your payment gateway, product pages, or checkout process.

• Objective: Detect a significant drop in daily sales revenue.
• Evaluation Frequency: Daily
• Segment: All Users
• Condition: Metric = Ecommerce revenue | Operator = Has anomaly (let Google figure it out) OR % decreases by more than | Value = 30% vs. same day last week
• Name: Alert - Daily Revenue Dropped Anomaly

3. The "We Went Viral!" Alert

Not all surprises are bad. This alert helps you catch lightning in a bottle by notifying you when a specific page or piece of content is gaining unusual traction.

• Objective: Get notified when users spike on a key page (e.g., service pages, landing pages).
• Evaluation Frequency: Daily
• Segment: All Users
• Condition: Metric = Views | Add another condition: Page path and screen class 'contains' /your-blog-post-url/
• Rule: % increases more than | Value = 100% vs. same day last week
• Name: Alert - Spike in Page Views for [Your Page Name]

4. The "Broken Links" Alert

A sudden increase in visits to your "404 Page Not Found" page's title usually means you have a broken internal link, a messed-up redirect from a marketing campaign, or another site is linking to a non-existent page.

• Objective: Monitor how many users land on a "Page Not Found" page.
• Evaluation Frequency: Daily
• Segment: All Users
• Condition: Metric = Views | Add another condition: Page title 'contains' Page Not Found (adjust this to match your site's 404-page title).
• Rule: Is greater than | Value = 25 (adjust based on your normal traffic)
• Name: Alert - Spike in 404 Errors

5. The "Key Conversion Suddenly Dropped" Alert

This alert monitors one specific, business-critical conversion action, such as lead-form submissions or free-trial signups.

• Objective: Ensure essential conversion actions are working correctly.
• Evaluation Frequency: Daily
• Segment: All Users
• Condition: Metric = Conversions | Add another condition: Event name 'exactly matches' generate_lead (use your conversion event name)
• Rule: % decreases by more than | Value = 50% vs. same day last week
• Name: Alert - Big Drop in New Leads

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Alerts

To ensure your custom alerts remain helpful and don't just become background noise, follow these best practices:

• Avoid Alert Fatigue: Don't create an alert for every metric. Focus on what's truly vital to your business goals. Monitor overall traffic, key conversion events, and revenue. Too many emails will lead you to ignore all of them.
• Set Realistic Thresholds: If your lead volume naturally varies by 25% each day, an alert for a 10% drop will trigger constantly and become useless. Start with broader thresholds (e.g., 40-50% change) and tighten them as you understand your data's natural rhythm. Better yet, use GA4's "Has anomaly" operator and let its AI find what's statistically significant.
• Be Specific Where It Counts: A general "traffic drop" alert is okay, but specific alerts for "organic traffic drop" or "paid traffic drop" can help you identify the source of the problem much faster.
• Review and Refine: Your business priorities change. Revisit your alerts every few months to pause outdated ones and create new ones that align with your current objectives.

Final Thoughts

Setting up custom alerts in Google Analytics is a powerful way to stay on top of your website's health, catch problems early, and spot opportunities without being glued to your dashboards. Taking 30 minutes to configure a handful of key alerts will give you valuable peace of mind and help you transition from reactive to proactive data analysis.

Getting an alert is a great first step because it tells you what happened. But the next logical step is to discover why it happened. Instead of getting bogged down in reporting tools trying to hunt down the root cause, we built Graphed to do the heavy lifting for you. We connect all your crucial data sources - Google Analytics, ad platforms, your CRM, your e-commerce platform - and let you ask questions in plain English. For example, when you see an alert about a drop in conversions, you can simply ask, "Which marketing channels saw the biggest drop in 'purchase' events last week?" and get an instant, clear answer. This turns static data into an interactive conversation that helps you move from insight to action in seconds.