Create a threshold monitor

Get an alert when a metric goes above or below your chosen threshold.

Wijnand Meijer avatar
Written by Wijnand Meijer
Updated over a week ago

With a threshold monitor, you can monitor if a metric of your choosing goes above or below a value of your choosing in one of the following time frames:

  • Yesterday

  • Last 7 days

  • Last 30 days

  • Last 60 days

  • Last 90 days

Every day, TrueClicks will look back at your chosen time frame and alert you whenever the metric goes beyond your threshold.

Get started with our templates in the gallery

The fastest way to create a threshold monitor is to pick one of the templates from our gallery by clicking the "+Add monitors" button and then "Create from gallery."

This will load our templates as shown in the animation below:

Right now, the following threshold templates are available in our gallery:

  • Lost search impression share due to budget. Monitors if search campaigns lost more than 1% of impression share due to a too low daily budget during the last 7 days.

  • Too low branded search impression share. Monitors if campaigns that contain "brand" in their name have a search impression share below 95% in the last 7 days.

  • Too low branded search absolute top impression rate. Monitors if campaigns that contain "brand" in their name have an absolute top search impression rate below 50% in the last 7 days.

  • Too high Display CTR. Monitors if Display campaigns have CTR above 1% in the last 7 days.

When you open one of the templates above, you can see and easily adjust all the settings to make them your own.

Create a threshold alert from scratch

1. Select accounts and campaigns

The first step is selecting which account(s) and/or campaign(s) you want to monitor. This could be all accounts linked to TrueClicks, one campaign in one account, and everything in between.

Selection 1: Run for accounts

  • All accounts (Google Ads)

  • Selected accounts (Google Ads)

  • All accounts (Microsoft Advertising)

  • Selected accounts (Microsoft Advertising)

Choosing "All accounts" skips the manual account selection and moves straight to the "Monitor" selection. This means the monitor will run for all accounts linked to TrueClicks.

Choosing "Selected accounts" will let you choose your accounts manually, as you can see below.

Selection 2: Select accounts

If you chose "Selected accounts" in the previous step, you must manually choose one or more accounts you want to monitor. There's a search box on top to help you quickly find the right account(s):
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Selection 3: Monitor

  • Account(s) (individual): monitors performance at the account level.

  • Campaign(s) (individual): monitors performance at the campaign level, which can be based on their type (e.g., search, shopping, display, pmax) or name (e.g., name contains or does not contain a value you enter). If you create a monitor for just one account, you can even select individual campaigns within that account.

  • Accounts (aggregated): combines and weighs data to collectively monitor performance for multiple accounts. Multiple accounts are treated as if they were one account.

  • Campaigns (aggregated): combines and weighs data to collectively monitor performance for multiple campaigns. Multiple campaigns are treated as if they were one campaign.

Selection 4: Run for campaigns

This option only appears if 'Campaigns' has been selected in the previous step. You can choose from these four methods to select the campaigns you want to include in this monitor.

  • All campaigns: monitor all campaigns within your account selection.

  • Selected campaigns: choose your campaigns manually. This option is only available if you have selected just one account in step 2.

  • Campaign type: select a campaign type to monitor. All campaigns with that type will automatically become part of the monitor.

    • For Google Ads, you can pick one of the following campaign types:

      • Discovery

      • Display

      • Hotel

      • Local

      • Local services

      • App

      • Performance Max

      • Search

      • Shopping

      • Smart

      • Video

    • For Microsoft Advertising, you can pick one of the following campaign types:

      • Shopping

      • Audience

      • Dynamic search

      • Search and content

  • Name contains: enter a value the campaign names should contain (e.g., "branded"). This only works in accounts with consistent and non-overlapping naming conventions. So it wouldn't work if you call branded campaigns "branded" and generic campaigns "non-branded" as both contain the word "branded," making it a useless filter.

  • Name doesn't contain: enter a value the campaign names should not contain. Again, this only works with a consistent and non-overlapping naming convention.
    ​

2. Date rage

Select the time frame you want TrueClicks to check daily. For example, if you pick "Last 30 days", then every day, we'll look at the data from the last 30 days.

  • Yesterday

  • Last 7 days

  • Last 30 days

  • Last 60 days

  • Last 90 days

After setting the date range, choose your metric(s) to monitor.

3. Thresholds to monitor

Choose a metric to monitor, enter the threshold value and choose if you want to get an alert when it goes above or below your threshold value:

For calculated metrics (like CTR, CPC, CPA), we have a corresponding default minimum volume filter to prevent generating alerts before the calculated metric is significant.

Metric

Minimum volume filters

CTR

100 clicks

Avg. CPC

100 clicks

Avg. CPM

1,000 impressions

Impr. (Top) %

1,000 impressions

Impr. (Abs. Top) %

1,000 impressions

Avg. CPV (Video only)

1,000 impressions (video only)

Views (Video only)

1,000 impressions (video only)

View rate (Video only)

1,000 impressions (video only)

Cost / conv.

10 conversions

Conv. rate

10 conversions

Conv. value / cost

10 conversions

Search impr. share

1,000 impressions

Search lost IS (rank)

1,000 impressions

Search lost IS (budget)

1,000 impressions

Add threshold metric

If you want, you can track multiple metrics with one monitor. This is useful if multiple metrics are closely related and you don't want to create separate monitors for each.

Select a severity level

Not every threshold is equally urgent. That's why we allow you to pick a severity level for each monitor, so you'll quickly see which alerts need immediate attention and which can wait. You can easily adjust this later on.
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4. Additional setting

Name

Try to summarize all your settings in the name so it's clear what you're monitoring to everyone (including your later self).


We recommend one of the following naming conventions for thresholds:

{Too high/many} or {Too low/few} {metric} in {account/campaign desciption} - {time frame} 

or:

{metric} > or < {value} in {account/campaign desciption} - {time frame} 

For example:

Too high CPA in Sterling Cooper generic campaigns - Last 30 days

or

CPA > $150 in Sterling Cooper generic campaigns - Last 30 days

Email notifications

By default, "Users with My Accounts" are selected to receive email notifications. This means that if an account is involved that someone has selected as "My account," that person will automatically receive an email alert. Another good reason to make sure everyone has their my accounts selection complete.

Next to users with my accounts, you can add email addresses manually in the input field below. This is great for:

  • People who don't have access to TrueClicks but should still receive an email.

  • Forwarding the email notification to Microsoft Teams or Slack.

Alternatively (but not recommended), you can select:

  • None

  • Selected TrueClicks users

  • Every TrueClicks user


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