Warnings & updates

Trackingplan detects and sends you real-time alerts about all updates or issues in your tracking. These are the different types of warnings that Trackingplan will automatically notify you about and that we will see in more detail throughout this section:

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Traffic Warnings

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KPI Warnings

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Specification Warnings

Missing Properties

Conditionally Missing Properties

Recommended Specs Warnings

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For problems related to specification warnings, you’ll be redirected to our Debug Warning View to help you identify the values that may have caused the appearance of your warnings.

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Destination Implementation Warnings

Google Analytics Implementation Warnings

Traffic Warnings

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Trackingplan automatically detects abnormal variations in your event traffic. Whether these are related to an implementation bug, an actual unexpected user behavior, or an intended code change, Trackingplan will flag any significant traffic change to monitor your events in production.

Let’s see what type of traffic warnings you’ll be able to automatically spot:

Missing Events

Trackingplan will notify you if any event in your tracking plan vanishes completely and has no traffic at all for a full day. If this scenario is detected, you will see a missing event warning in Trackingplan’s Digests and your Dashboard the day thereafter.

Just by clicking on the warning, you’ll have access to your Warning Management View, where you’ll be able to dive deep into your warnings and understand them better.

In there, you’ll also be provided with a Daily Traffic Chart to see the event’s traffic evolution at a glance and instantly understand its impact.

You can also add any relevant information to track its progress for seamless collaboration within your team. To deactivate missing event warnings, simply navigate to your Warning Settings.

Traffic Drops

At Trackingplan, we know the traffic in your events might also change significantly during weekdays or weekends, special dates, or other factors like campaigning. For this reason, we monitor event traffic according to your user traffic.

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For example, an add_to_cart event might trigger 0.1-1% of the registered daily users. However, if this suddenly drops to 0.05% only, we will notify you so that you can discard any possible issues. The root cause might be a bug in the funnel, a redesign, or can be even related to business or marketing activities. For example, campaigning might change your typical user behavior significantly and result in Trackingplan flagging unexpected hit drops if the conversion or behavior of these new users is different.

Our model learns from your historical traffic to take into account your typical user behavior, i.e. how often they trigger each event and with what daily and weekly variance. For this reason, our monitoring will improve over time to adapt as much as possible to your tracking changes.

You can always deactivate traffic drop warnings or set the tolerances at which they trigger, choosing between low, medium, or high tolerance levels. Learn more about Traffic Warning Tolerances here.

Traffic Peaks

Oppositely, at Trackingplan we also know that there are certain events whose increase can be negative (e.g.: abandoned_cart). That's why we also support and alert you about anomalous traffic peaks.

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To monitor traffic peaks, you’ll need to manually activate the warning for the events, campaigns, landings, or other acquisition dimensions whose increase may be deemed as negative or relevant for your business. Simply navigate to your Warning Settings to activate them.

Similar to Traffic Drops, you can deactivate traffic peak warnings at any time or adjust their trigger threshold by selecting low, medium, or high tolerance levels. Learn more about Traffic Warning Tolerances here.

Custom Thresholds

Trackingplan will always propose predefined alerts based on your business type, but you can also set up custom daily thresholds above or below any threshold you have to be alerted only when the conditions you specify are met.

This warning is customizable per event.

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You can also activate these same traffic warnings for Acquisition (Campaigns, Landings, Referrers, Mediums, Sources, and Pages). To do that, hover over the item you want to track its traffic closely and click on Customize Warnings.

KPI Warnings

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Trackingplan enables analysts to define a series of KPIs, making it easy for them to determine the reliability of the data they are viewing and ensure the credibility of their reports. However, if Trackingplan detects abnormal variations in your KPIs, it will automatically issue a warning.

These KPI-specific warnings are similar to the traffic warnings we’ve just seen but are applied to your daily KPI values. Let’s see what type of KPI warnings you’ll be notified about with Trackingplan:

Missing KPI values

Trackingplan will notify you if any of your KPIs show no values for one or more days.

Just by clicking on the warning, you’ll have access to your Warning Management View, where you’ll be able to dive deep into your warnings and understand them better.

You can also add any relevant information to track its progress for seamless collaboration within your team, customize the traffic threshold, mute or share the warning, or even deactivate missing KPI values warnings.

KPI value drops

Trackingplan will notify you if our system detects a significant drop in your KPI values.

KPI value peaks

Oppositely, Trackingplan will also generate a warning if it detects a significant peak in the KPI value.

Custom Thresholds

Trackingplan will always propose predefined alerts based on what it automatically learns from your data, but you can also set up custom daily thresholds above or below any threshold you have to be alerted only when the conditions you specify are met.

KPI Value Below Daily Limit: Triggered when the KPI value falls below a user-configured threshold.
KPI Value Above Daily Limit: Triggered when the KPI value exceeds a user-configured threshold.

Again, you can always explore further on the warning by clicking on it.

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Moreover, Trackingplan will also flag as a warning those KPIs whose associated events have warnings.

Specification Warnings

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Trackingplan also notifies you whenever your properties, events, and user acquisition data don’t conform to the rules you have specified or that Trackingplan has automatically inferred for you.

Let’s dive into all the specification warnings you’ll be able to automatically spot:

Missing Properties

You can specify whether or not a property is required within an event. If required properties are not being tracked in event hits all the time, Trackingplan will automatically send you a warning.

In the case of specification warnings, the chart in your Warning Management View will show you the daily rates of specification matches vs. mismatches, including warnings triggered based on the required constraints specified.

This warning is customizable and you can set your tolerance percentage.

Conditionally Missing Properties

Moreover, Trackingplan will also notify you about missing hits on the designated required pages you previously set as conditional.

Setting a property as “conditional” can be very useful for events that occur on many different pages. In this sense, adding a conditional could allow us to differentiate between required or nullable within the very same property, depending on its value.

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For instance, the event page_view is usually triggered on many different pages. By using a conditional, we can modify the property page_type and only set the ‘home page’ and the ‘checkout page’ as required, while leaving the rest as nullable. That way, Trackingplan will notify you only if there are missing hits on those pages you’ve marked as required, allowing you to be much more precise on your requirements.

This provides you with greater control and precision in defining your tracking requirements, allowing you to focus on the most critical aspects of your data.

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Learn more about Conditional Properties here.

Type Collision

The property is there but with a different type. Trackingplan automatically interprets which data type is being tracked and, if it detects any data type collision, a warning will be generated.

This warning is also customizable and you can set the tolerance percentage you want.

Validation errors

When a property, event, or UTM parameter has validation errors and does not conform to the values you have specified.

Validation enum warnings: This triggers when a value that is not within the list of predefined constants you have already specified is detected in any of your properties. Moreover, in case you’ve missed the parameter that is now causing the error in your Enum definition, you’ll be able to change the specification directly throughout your Warning Management View.

You can learn more about how to validate property values with Enums.

Validation regex warnings: It happens when a property does not match with the regular expression pattern (Regex) to which all the values seen for a property must conform.

Learn more about how to validate property values with regular expressions.

Validation function warnings: When a property does not conform to the function provided to validate an event.

Learn more about function validations.

Campaign validation warnings: When UTMs in your campaigns do not follow your campaign naming specifications.

Learn more about campaign validation.

Recommended Specs Warnings

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Trackingplan also applies event and property specifications recommended by your Analytics services and your Marketing tools, triggering Specification Warnings if these requirements aren’t correctly implemented in your sites or apps.

By now, only Google Analytics 4 Recommended Events are supported, with more coming soon. Contact support to let us know which tool you’d like to see next.

Destination Implementation Warnings

Each of the different destinations we integrate with has specific peculiarities and limits. Although these are usually well-documented, their integrations lack controls, making it difficult to realize when certain data isn't being collected or errors occur.

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This is precisely why Trackingplan automatically informs you of errors in how your providers have been implemented.

Google Analytics Implementation Warnings

Trackingplan will automatically implement a first set of validation functions to verify certain values and their limits within Google Analytics.

The following rules will activate automatically whenever Trackingplan detects hits for that provider:

URL length: This will automatically validate that the Google Analytics endpoint URL falls within the specified limits.
POST payload size: This will automatically validate that the size of the POST payload sent to Google Analytics is within the limits.

You can also disable Google Analytics Implementation Warnings through your settings at any time, and get more information about the problem on your Warning Management View.

Possible Warning Use Cases

Events Stop: If several events stop occurring with a new release of your website or app, there may be a bug in the implementation of your analytics. Trackingplan helps you identify which events have been impacted in your landings or pages so you can address them quickly.
Conversion Funnel Breakage: If your sales drop significantly in a short amount of time, something in your conversion funnel may be broken. Trackingplan will help you identify exactly where potential customers are leaving your funnel.
Source Traffic Increase: If the level of traffic from a specific source increases, Trackingplan can help you identify where and why it did so from the moment it happened.
Geographical Traffic Decrease: If your traffic from a specific location or country decreases, you can explore factors that may be impacting that market. With Trackingplan, you can quickly identify which geographical area has experienced a decrease in traffic.
Payment Gateway Drop: If the conversion rate in your payment gateway drops 10% below normal, you could be receiving bad-quality traffic, or there may be pricing issues on some products. Trackingplan gives you a roadmap to start investigating the cause.
User Navigation Changes: If user behavior changes and users start navigating to unexpected pages, you may need to optimize your funnel. The Trackingplan dashboard helps you identify how user behavior has changed by tracking increases and decreases in your events and properties.

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Trackingplan will always propose predefined alerts based on your business type. However, you can also configure alerts to ensure you receive warnings only when the conditions you specify are met. Learn more about customizing warnings here.

Updates

Trackingplan will also notify you in real-time about all the changes in your tracking and will automatically monitor them so that you can ensure any update made in your analytics is implemented correctly and consistently across your organization.

Active new events - When new hits are reported in an event for the first time.

New properties - When new hits are discovered in a property for the first time.

New pixels - When a new pixel is reported in any of the SaaS tools used in your frontends for the first time.

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