Alerts and the daily digest
What triggers an alert, how the daily digest groups smaller changes, and who gets the emails.
Each morning, after the daily import, we look for pages whose clicks, position or CTR moved sharply in the past week. Big moves become alerts. Smaller ones are grouped into a daily digest, so one bad week does not bury you in emails.
What we look for
| Change | What it means |
|---|---|
| Click drop | A page is getting clearly fewer clicks than the week before |
| Position drop | A page has slipped down the results |
| CTR drop | A page is shown as often but clicked less |
| Impression spike | A page is suddenly shown far more often |
| Position uptick | A page has climbed the results |
| Click gain | A page is getting clearly more clicks |
Each alert has a severity (low, medium, high or critical) that grows with the size of the move. Changes in clicks, CTR and impressions only count on pages with enough traffic the week before, so a page going from two clicks to one does not raise an alert.
We also watch Topics: a topic that loses a large share of its impressions, and an emerging topic that takes off.
Only pages with data in the latest week are compared, so a page that vanished from search altogether does not raise an alert.
Alert or digest?
Every page-level change goes into the daily digest: one entry per site and type of change, such as "12 pages lost rankings this week".
You also get an individual alert for the biggest moves: a steep fall in position, a large click drop or gain on one of your busier pages, each topic change, and a summary of each digest.
The Alerts page
Alerts has two tabs.
Inbox lists individual alerts. Filter by severity, mark one read, or press Mark all read. Dismissing an alert deletes it. Read alerts are deleted after 30 days anyway.
Daily digest groups the page-level changes by type: clicks down, position down, CTR, impressions, position up and clicks up. Open a digest to see every page in it, with its figures for both weeks.
The number next to Alerts in the sidebar counts unread high and critical alerts.
Alert emails
When there are new high or critical alerts, we email the team owner a summary of the top five, with a link to the Inbox. Big gains count too, so not every alert email is bad news.
To avoid a flood, we send at most one alert email per period, and the period depends on your plan. See Plans, trials and billing.
Reading an alert
An alert says what moved, not why. Before you act on one:
- look at the page's chart for an annotation or a Google update on the same days (see Annotations)
- check Breakdowns to see whether one device or country explains it
- remember a week is short: one unusual day can move a small page a long way
Sign in or join the early access list to see exactly how this is worked out.