Get alerts when website traffic drops

A traffic drop worth hearing about is a day that falls a set percentage below your site's recent normal level. Kite's default is a day whose visitors fall 25% or more below the daily average of the previous seven days. That gap is large enough that ordinary day-to-day variation doesn't set it off.

You can change every part of that rule by asking:

• The size of the drop. "Tell me if traffic falls 15% below last week's average" makes the watch more sensitive.
• The comparison. Kite can compare each day with the average of the previous seven days or with the day before. "Versus last week" means the seven-day average, and "versus yesterday" means the day before.
• The number. On a site Kite hosts, the watch can follow daily visitors, page views, or sessions.
• The direction. A watch can also fire when traffic rises, which is useful during a launch or when a post might be picked up somewhere.

Kite holds the comparison to a few safeguards so that it means something. It needs at least four of the previous seven days measured before it judges a day, so a gap in the data isn't mistaken for a trend. It also skips sites Kite hosts that average fewer than 10 visitors a day, because two visitors falling to one is a 50% drop that tells you nothing. If you ask for a comparison Kite can't watch reliably, such as the same week last year, it tells you which comparisons it can use and lets you pick.

Kite checks your traffic every six hours and judges the most recent complete day, so you hear about a bad day within about six hours of it ending. Kite counts days in UTC. A site that has a bad Tuesday gets its alert on Wednesday, rather than at the end of the month. Google Analytics and PostHog sometimes finish a day's numbers late, so an alert for a site measured there can arrive a little later, once that tool has reported the day.

If your team has several websites, one watch covers all of them. Kite holds each site to its own baseline, so a quiet week on a small product site doesn't hide behind steady traffic on your main one.

Kite measures traffic on every website it builds and hosts for you, so a traffic alert on those sites needs nothing connected. When Kite starts measuring one of your sites, it also starts a traffic watch with the default threshold and tells you why the watch exists and how to stop it.

The watch reads the same built-in analytics Kite uses for its traffic reports. Those analytics show visitors, page views, and sessions by day, along with your most visited pages and the sites that referred visitors to you. That gives Kite what it needs to tell you which pages lost traffic when an alert fires.

For a website Kite doesn't host, connect the analytics account where your traffic is measured and ask Kite to watch it. Kite can watch daily numbers in Google Analytics and PostHog. It sets up the query that pulls the number you care about, such as daily sessions from your GA4 property or daily page views from PostHog, and checks that number against your threshold.

When Kite saves the watch, it tells you the starting number it read, such as "1,920 sessions yesterday," next to the rule it will hold future days to. That lets you confirm it's reading the right property and the right number before the first alert ever arrives.

If you ask for a Google Analytics alert before the account is connected, Kite gives you a Connect button and sets the watch up as soon as the connection is in place. If a site Kite hosts also sends data to Google Analytics, Kite watches that site through its own built-in analytics.

A Kite traffic alert gives you the size of the drop, where it came from, and a next step. It starts with the numbers: the day's traffic, the baseline it was compared with, and the percentage change. Then Kite reads your analytics to see whether the drop is spread across the site or concentrated in one place.

Here's an example. Say your site averaged 1,990 visitors a day last week and had 1,450 yesterday, a 27% drop. Kite breaks the day down by page and traffic source and finds that every page held steady except your pricing page, where visits from Google search fell from about 610 to 70. The alert says so, and it suggests one next step, such as checking whether the pricing page lost its Google ranking.

Kite separates what the data shows from what it doesn't. It tells you where the drop came from when your analytics show it, and when the numbers can't explain the drop, it says that and names what it would check. If someone on your team has already explained the drop in Slack, such as a planned site migration that took the site offline for an afternoon, Kite leaves it alone.

To dig into a drop once you know about it, see Find out why your website traffic dropped.

Kite sends each traffic alert to the place your team already works with it:

• In Slack. If you asked for the watch in a Slack thread, the alert arrives as a reply in that thread, next to the conversation that set it up. Watches Kite started on its own, or ones asked for elsewhere, post in your team's Slack channel.
• By email. If your team works with Kite in the web app and hasn't added Kite to Slack, Kite emails the alert to the person who set up the watch, or to the team owner for a watch Kite started. Replying to the email continues the conversation with Kite.

Either way, the alert is the start of the work. Reply and ask Kite to compare the pricing page's Google rankings with last week, check whether a recent change broke something, or update the page that lost traffic.

You manage a traffic alert by asking Kite in plain language. "Only tell me if traffic falls 40%" changes the threshold. "Pause the traffic alert until after the migration" quiets it, and "Turn the traffic alert back on" resumes it. Ask "Why are you watching our traffic?" and Kite tells you the reason it recorded when the watch was created.

When someone on your team pauses or stops a watch, Kite doesn't turn it back on by itself.