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Custom Alerts

Stay informed about important changes in your affiliate marketing campaigns without constantly monitoring your dashboard.

Written by Sasha Gerold

Custom alerts let you define performance-threshold-based notifications for your affiliates, offers, and advertisers. When the condition you set is met, you receive a notification in your Trackdesk inbox and (if enabled) by email.

This is one of three alert systems in Trackdesk:

  • System alerts - built-in notifications for platform events Trackdesk knows about (e.g., postback failures, settlement events)

  • Custom alerts (this article) - your own performance-metric thresholds for entities you choose

  • Alerts for affiliates - alerts that affiliates configure for themselves

Overview

Custom alerts notify you when predefined conditions are met for your affiliates, offers, or advertisers. For example, you can set up an alert to notify you when conversions drop below a certain threshold or when revenue exceeds a target amount within a specific timeframe.

Creating Custom Alerts

To create a new custom alert:

  1. Navigate to the Alerts page in the Tools section of the main menu

  2. Click the Create Alert button

  3. Fill in the required information:

    1. Name: Give your alert a descriptive name. This name is also shown in the inbox when the alert is triggered.

    2. Alert About: Choose what the alert will monitor:

      1. Affiliate: Monitor performance of specific affiliates

      2. Offer: Monitor performance of specific offers

      3. Advertiser: Monitor performance of specific advertisers (available for networks only)

    3. Look Back Time: Set the time period (in hours) to analyze data (minimum 1 hour, maximum 90 days/2160 hours)

    4. Metric: Metric: Select the performance metric to monitor:

      1. Clicks

      2. Conversions

      3. Revenue

      4. Payout

      5. MLM Commission

      6. Profit

      7. Conversion per Click Rate

      8. Average Revenue

      9. Average Payout

      10. Revenue per Click (RPC)

      11. Earnings per Click (EPC)

    5. Operation: Choose the condition:

      1. Greater Than: Alert triggers when the metric exceeds the threshold

      2. Less Than: Alert triggers when the metric falls below the threshold

    6. Threshold: Set the value that will trigger the alert

    7. Conversion Types: Optionally filter by specific conversion types

    8. Conversion Statuses: Optionally filter by specific conversion statuses (Approved, Pending, On Hold, etc.)

Notification Channels

Custom alerts can be delivered through:

  • In-app notifications - enabled by default; appear in the Trackdesk notification center

Notification channel preferences are managed at the user level under your account notification settings.

Managing Custom Alerts

You can manage your custom alerts through in the Alerts page:

  • Active Alerts: View and manage all your currently active alerts

  • Inactive Alerts: View and manage paused alerts

  • Edit Alert: Modify existing alert settings

  • Pause/Activate Alert: Temporarily disable or enable an alert

  • Delete Alert: Permanently remove an alert

You can pause the alert as shown in the image below:

You can un-pause it as shown in the image below:

The edit button and delete button are also next to it.

Viewing Triggered Alerts

When an alert is triggered:

  1. You'll receive a notification in your Trackdesk notification center

  2. The notification will include details about which entities (affiliates, offers, or advertisers) triggered the alert

  3. The notification message will follow this format: "[Number] [entities] had [operation] [threshold] [metric] in the past [time period]"

Limitations

  • When targeting specific entities, you can select up to 100 affiliates, 100 advertisers, or 100 offers per alert (use the default All setting to not use any filtering).

  • The maximum look-back period is 90 days (2160 hours)

  • The minimum look-back period is 1 hour

  • Alert names are limited to 100 characters

  • Custom alerts are enabled by default in the in-app notification channel

  • Some metrics (like Conversion per Click Rate) are displayed as percentages, while monetary metrics use your account's currency setting

Examples

A few patterns that work well:

  • Tracking outage detection - Conversions Less Than 1 over 24 hours on top-performing affiliates. Catches when something has broken silently.

  • Fraud spike warning - Clicks Greater Than [your historical max] over 1 hour on a single affiliate. Surfaces traffic anomalies before they pollute reporting.

  • Revenue milestone - Revenue Greater Than [target] over 30 days on a key offer. Useful for hitting commercial targets and triggering manual celebrations or comms.

  • Underperforming offer - EPC Less Than [floor] over 7 days. Flags offers that need creative refresh or payout adjustment.

Tips

  • Set thresholds based on historical data, not aspirational targets - alerts that fire constantly stop being read.

  • Use shorter look-back periods for fast-changing metrics (clicks, conversions); longer periods for noisy ones (EPC, average revenue).

  • Segment alerts by affiliate tier, offer category, or advertiser group rather than running one mega-alert across everything.

Custom alerts help you stay on top of your performance metrics without constant manual monitoring, allowing you to quickly identify and address issues or capitalize on positive trends.

Related Articles
Affiliate Postbacks
Alerts
Advertiser User Role
Alerts for Affiliates
Dashboard and Reports
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