[Blog] Practical alerts examples #10147
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bijanbwb
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contents/blog/practical-alerts.mdx
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| To keep life interesting, it's important to live in a state of perpetual ignorance. When things are going well, there's no need to find out why. When things go south, let anxiety run its course. |
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I wrote this as a fun, funny introduction. But if it doesn't land then it's no big deal to me if we want to rip it out and start with the "PostHog's new alert features..." line below.
bijanbwb
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Worth thinking about how we are going to promote this piece, likely needs some solid backlinks to help people find their way there.
Could we plan a social post/thread for it?
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Good call. I think we could probably pick out the most compelling example(s) and share those on social.
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+1. Should link from the Alerts docs for a start. Could probably add to some product analytics pages.
We can also turn the individual ideas into social posts.
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A lot of gif and they aren't the same size which is a bit jarring
- I think the
<ProductImage>component centers them - If not, the second one might just be fine.
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| We can set the frequency to check this daily. For critical alerts like this, you can add more than one email to the notification list and ensure the entire billing team receives the alert. | ||
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| ### 4. Monitor deploys and new features |
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This whole section is a bit too vague, what are some specific ways they can use alerts to make sure their deploy goes well? Also, what are the most important alerts to set up?
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| So you can set up an alert that coincides with the launch of a redesigned page and verify that the number of CTA clicks should hopefully be increasing, not decreasing. | ||
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| ### 5. Alert on changes in conversion rates |
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| ### 6. Alert on breakdown in referral sources |
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This is basically the same as the first one
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Right. I think the differentiation for this one was just to show that you can create alerts for trends that have a breakdown. But I'll take another look and see if there's a way to further differentiate. It's a decent example that was mentioned in the GitHub issue, but you're right it could be redundant.
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <[email protected]>
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| To keep life interesting, it's important to live in a state of perpetual ignorance. When things are going well, there's no need to find out why. When things go downhill, let anxiety run its course. |
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This is great, btw. Love a bit of humor as a starter!
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| Instead of needing to manually check insights, you can track important metrics and get email notifications when they cross a threshold that you specify. The threshold can be an absolute value (e.g. pageviews exceeded 1,000) or a relative amount (e.g. conversion rate increased by 10%). | ||
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| To show you how you can use alerts, we'll start by showing how to create an alert and then dive into practical examples and use cases. |
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Here are some ideas for how you can use alerts, so you're never caught out again.
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| These kinds of alerts can also be useful when traffic spikes are unexpected. We often see this at PostHog when our content gets featured in a popular email newsletter or shared on Hacker News. When we notice an influx of new signups, it can be fun to dig in and try to figure out where they came from. | ||
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| For example, we can set up an alert when the number of pageviews for our [pricing page](/pricing) rises above 8,000 views for the week. First, we [create a new trend insight](/docs/product-analytics/trends/overview#1-creating-a-new-trend) to track pageviews where "Path Name" equals "/pricing". Then, filter by the year-to-date and group by week. |
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+1 Ian's point.
Additional suggestion: could you add a screenshot of a fully-configured alert for each example? I think this will help people grok what it looks like and how to make their own.
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+1. Should link from the Alerts docs for a start. Could probably add to some product analytics pages.
We can also turn the individual ideas into social posts.
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| ### 2. Get notified for 404 page anomalies |
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fwiw, I feel like the 404 section is a bit on the long side. Would be good if you could simplify a little.
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| Alerts are currently available for trends insights. But we're currently working on adding alerts for [funnels](/docs/product-analytics/funnels), which will make it easier to track conversions across various stages. For example, we can create a funnel to see how many users are following through and signing up after visiting our pricing page. | ||
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| Thanks to [Anirudh](/community/profiles/30974) for making this much-requested feature a reality. The idea for threshold-based alerts started as a [GitHub issue](https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/14331), so if you have other interesting use cases and suggestions for how to improve the features, be sure to let us know! |
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I really like this point
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| title: '6 practical uses for PostHog alerts' | |||
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I don't love this headline. We should workshop some ideas before we go live
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Andy Vandervell <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Andy Vandervell <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Andy Vandervell <[email protected]>
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Blog post about our new Alerts features with some practical examples.
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