Traffic alerts email you when visits suddenly jump or drop, and say what caused a jump. Here are the exact rules behind them.

What traffic alerts do

When a site has a day clearly outside the usual, Crustat sends you a short email: either the site is busier than normal, or it’s much quieter. For a jump, it also tells you where the extra visitors came from. Alerts are off until you turn them on.

Turn them on

Open the account menu (your initial, top right) and choose Email notifications.
In the Traffic alerts card, switch on Email me alerts.

That’s all. Alerts cover every site you can see in the workspace, and each person turns them on for themselves. Viewers only get alerts for the sites they’re allowed to see.

When an alert is sent

Crustat checks once an hour. It compares today so far with yesterday up to the same time of day, in your site’s time zone. So at 2pm, it’s today until 2pm against yesterday until 2pm.

A jump needs all three:

today has at least twice as many visitors as yesterday by this time,
today has at least 30 visitors,
yesterday by this time had at least 10.

A brand-new site’s first busy day never sets one off.

A drop needs all three:

yesterday by this time had at least 30 visitors,
it’s past 10am on the site’s clock, so a slow morning doesn’t trigger it,
today has half as many visitors or fewer.

Each site sends at most one jump alert and one drop alert per day. A day that starts with a rush and then goes quiet can send both.

Because the check runs hourly, an alert reaches you within about an hour of the numbers crossing the line.

What the email says

For a jump, the subject reads “Visits jumped 140% on example.com today”. The email gives today’s visitors so far, the change, yesterday’s figure by the same time, and the likely cause:

a campaign that brought at least a quarter of today’s visitors: “Most new visitors came from your “spring-sale” campaign”,
or, failing that, a referring site with at least a quarter,
plus a page, if it had at least 40% of today’s visitors.

For a drop, the subject reads “Visits dropped 60% on example.com today”. It adds a reminder to check that your Crustat line is still on your pages, or whether something changed on the site. A sudden drop can mean the line went missing after a theme or template change, so it’s worth a quick look.

Both have a See what’s happening button that opens the site’s dashboard on Today.

On the dashboard too

You don’t need alerts turned on to see this. Whenever today is a jump or a drop by the same rules, a notice sits at the top of the site’s dashboard, for example “Visits jumped 140% today”, with the same causes. Anyone who can see the site sees it, including people with a read-only link. Close it with Close this notice and it stays hidden in that browser for the rest of the day.

Things to know

Small sites stay quiet. The minimums of 30 and 10 visitors are there so a handful of visits doesn’t look like a surge.
Bots don’t set off alerts. Visits left out of your stats are left out here too. See how bots are kept out.
The thresholds are fixed. You can’t change them per site.

Stop getting them

Switch off Email me alerts under Email notifications, or use Unsubscribe from all at the foot of any alert. That second option asks you to confirm, then turns off alerts and reports in every workspace you’re in.

Get told about spikes and drops