Alerts: metrics, windows, thresholds and how often they run

Alerts are on every plan, including Basic. This page is the specification: what you can alert on, how a rule decides to fire, and when you will hear about it.

Two kinds of rule

Metric rules compare a metric over the current window with the same metric over the previous window of the same length, and fire when the change crosses your threshold in the direction you chose.

Pacing rules compare actual spend over the rule's window with the spend the monthly budget calls for over the same days, and fire when the gap crosses your threshold. Up means overspend, down means underspend:

expected   = monthly budget / 30.4 * window days
variance % = (actual - expected) / expected * 100

A pacing rule does not fire on a window with no recorded spend, because an idle account and a broken connection look the same from the numbers.

Scope

A rule watches one of three things:

• A whole workspace, as one total across its clients, with Google Ads and Meta combined. A workspace pacing rule needs a workspace budget, which is set separately from client budgets, so put pacing rules on clients.
• One client. The rule is checked separately for each ad account linked to the client, so each check covers one platform. One email lists every account that crossed the threshold in that check.
• One ad account of a client, and nothing else.

Metrics

Five base metrics are summed per day: impressions, clicks, cost, conversions and conversion value. Four derived metrics are computed from those sums per window:

ctr           = clicks / impressions
cpc           = cost / clicks
roas          = conversion value / cost
cost per conv = cost / conversions

Windows

A window is 1, 7, 14 or 30 complete days ending yesterday. Today is never included, because today's spend is still partial and would fire rules for the wrong reason. The comparison window is the same length, immediately before.

Direction and threshold

Direction is up, down or either. Thresholds are 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 45 or 50 per cent. A rule with "cost, up, 20 per cent, 7 days" fires when the last seven complete days cost at least 20 per cent more than the seven before them.

When rules run

Rules are evaluated hourly. A fired rule creates an entry in the alerts inbox in the app, with an unread badge in the sidebar. If the rule has email switched on, it also emails the organisation's owners and admins who have alert emails enabled; members see alerts in the app only. The same rule does not fire again for the same account within 24 hours, so a condition that stays true produces one alert a day, not one an hour. A client rule can still send a second email the same day if a different account crosses later.

Owners and admins can also press Evaluate now to check every rule at once. It sends no email, uses one analysis run, and its alerts count toward the 24 hours.

How many rules

Basic allows 20 alert rules, Standard 50 and Pro 200. Paused rules count. Only one active rule per metric, direction and window is allowed in each workspace or client.

What alerts do not do

• They never change a campaign or a budget. Adswave is read-only.
• They are not real time. Hourly evaluation on figures the platforms may still revise means an alert is a reason to open the account, not a settled fact.
• They do not watch individual campaigns in this version; the narrowest scope is one ad account.

Suggested first rules

• Pacing, 10 per cent, on every client with a monthly budget.
• Cost per click, up, 25 per cent, 7 days: the earliest sign of an expensive auction.
• Conversions, down, 30 per cent, 7 days: the earliest sign of a broken landing page or tracking.