I tried to replicate some of the alerts I usually use in GA setups and almost all of them require a specific segment because there are only conditions based on metrics or aggregated dimension values.
Decreased or increased traffic from a specific source, views of pages grouped / filtered by path (think “404”), regional conditions… To build alerts for significant changes in sessions or events for such segments… well…, segments need to be build that are more or less useless for other reports, adding to the list.
I wonder if there is a way around this or an easier solution? I always prefer to keep lists of segments and other assets as short as possible and so the need for “alert only segments” is slightly counterproductive The only workaround I could come up with is using segment names that differentiate segments built specifically for alerts from real “reporting segments”.
Hi @mbaersch,
thank you for your feedback and verbose description, it’s super valuable to understand the context.
Added to feature requests list for further processing and prioritization.
I would like to emphasize the request from @mbaersch ).
It would be very helpful to be able to trigger alerts directly e.g. by count of specific custom event names (“Alert me, if count for custom events with event name [xy] for the previous day is < 1”).
to me it feels most unfortunate that there is still no other solution for this than using segmentation.
As Markus pointed out, segments lists grow to an infinite length an tend to be quite difficult to handle (the more so, as there is no other possibility to structure segments than by name and not e.g. by creating hierachies as folders etc).
So I would like you to reconsider that request once again for future improvement .
The only workaround I could come up with is using segment names that differentiate segments built specifically for alerts from real “reporting segments”.