Vercel Analytics alerts and a weekly digest

Vercel shows traffic; it doesn’t tell you when it changes

Vercel Web Analytics answers when you look: open a project’s Analytics tab and the numbers are there. Nothing reaches out when a site’s visitors halve after a deploy, or when a client’s campaign takes off. With a handful of projects you might notice; with twenty, a drop can sit there for days. That’s the gap alerts and a weekly digest fill.

Drop and spike alerts

In Lookout, an alert watches one board, a group of sites, and emails you when a number moves past a threshold:

• What it watches: the board’s visitors, page views or pages per visit.
• Which way: a drop or a rise, by a percentage you choose, from 5% to 95% (30% by default).
• Against what: the last 7 days compared with the 7 days before, the same figures the dashboard shows.
• How often: checked every hour, and each alert emails at most once every 24 hours, so a slow slide doesn’t flood your inbox.

A workspace can have up to 20 alerts, and each can be paused without deleting it. The email goes to the owner who created the alert; every firing is also kept for 30 days under Recent notifications, so the team can see what fired and when. Email is the only channel today.

The weekly digest

Alerts are for surprises; the digest is the routine. Once a week, at 09:00 in your timezone on the day you pick (Monday, Tuesday, Friday or Sunday), every member of the workspace gets one email covering the boards you chose: visitors, page views and pages per visit over the last 7 days against the 7 before, and the four sites whose visitors moved most.

Each member can opt out of the digest, or of alerts, from Settings › Notifications or with the unsubscribe link in any email, without changing anyone else’s. Send me a test sends the digest to you right away, so you can see it before the first Monday.

Setting them up

1. Connect your Vercel team and put the sites you care about on a board (one per client works well).
2. Open Settings › Notifications.
3. Turn on the digest, pick its day and boards, and send yourself a test.
4. Add a drop alert on visitors for each important board; 30% is a sensible start, tighter for steady sites.

Lookout reads the numbers from Vercel Web Analytics with a read-only token, so nothing changes on your projects. See the dashboard behind the alerts in the live demo, or how agencies group client sites in Vercel Analytics for agencies.