15. Alerts & Notifications

Alerts let FullSession tell you when an audience changes size — "let me know when fewer than 100 people reach checkout this week" or "alert me when active mobile users drop 20% month over month." When an alert's condition is met, FullSession notifies you in the app, by email, or through Slack/Zapier. This chapter covers what alerts can watch, how to build them, how they're delivered, and how to work the in-app notification center.

Alerts are available from the Growth plan ([Chapter 17, section 17.1]) and governed by permissions (view / create / edit / delete). If you don't see Alerts, it isn't included in your plan or allowed by your role.

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15.1 What Alerts Do

It's important to be precise about what an alert watches, because it's narrower than many analytics tools:

An alert watches the number of unique users matching a segment, over a time window.

That's the single metric. You pick a segment ([Chapter 11 — Segments]) and a time frame (daily, weekly, or monthly), and FullSession notifies you when the count of unique users in that segment meets your condition — either crossing a fixed number or changing significantly versus the previous period.

What alerts can't watch

Alerts do not fire on error spikes, rage/dead clicks, conversion-rate drops, funnel steps, feedback scores, session duration, or custom events. If you need those, use:

You want to monitor…	Use instead
Conversion or drop-off changes	Funnels + Lift AI (Chapters 12 & 14)
Errors, frustration, engagement trends	Dashboards (review them) (Chapter 9)
UX issues affecting a goal, continuously	Lift AI issue detection (Chapter 14)

Think of alerts as audience-size monitors, and Lift AI as the continuous, AI-driven issue watcher.

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15.2 Creating an Alert

Alerts are created from a single dialog. You define what segment to watch, how often, and the condition.

The fields

1. Alert name — a name for the alert.

2. Segment — the segment whose user count you're watching ("Segment selected for the alert").

3. Frequency — Daily, Weekly, or Monthly (the comparison window).

4. Alert type — how the condition is evaluated: Value, Relative Change, or Absolute Change (explained in section 15.3).

5. Condition operator — depends on the type:

   • For Value: Greater than, Less than, Equal to.

   • For Relative/Absolute Change: Increased by, Decreased by.

6. Threshold — the number to compare against (a count, a percent, or an absolute difference).

7. Delivery & notification preferences — covered in sections 15.4–15.5.

One alert per segment

You can have one alert per segment, per site. If an alert already exists for a segment, you'll edit that one rather than create a second. To watch the same audience two different ways, you'd need two different segments.

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15.3 Alert Conditions Explained

The alert type determines how FullSession evaluates the segment's user count. There are three.

Value — compare to a fixed number

Fires when the current count crosses a threshold you set. Operators: Greater than, Less than, Equal to.

Example: Weekly · Value · Less than · 100 — "alert me when fewer than 100 users reached the checkout segment this week."

Relative Change — percentage change vs. the previous period

Fires when the count changes by a percentage versus the prior window. Operators: Increased by, Decreased by.

Example: Weekly · Relative Change · Decreased by · 20% — "alert me when the signups segment shrinks 20% week over week."

Absolute Change — raw difference vs. the previous period

Fires when the count changes by a raw number versus the prior window. Operators: Increased by, Decreased by.

Example: Monthly · Absolute Change · Increased by · 500 — "alert me when active mobile users grow by 500 month over month."

The time windows

Frequency	Compares
Daily	The last 24 hours vs. the previous 24 hours
Weekly	The last 7 days vs. the previous 7 days
Monthly	The last 30 days vs. the previous 30 days

Daily frequency supports only the Value type. Change-based comparisons (relative/absolute) are available on Weekly and Monthly frequencies.

Alerts are evaluated periodically in the background — they aren't real-time. FullSession checks your conditions on a regular cycle and notifies you when one is met.

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15.4 Delivery: App, Email, Slack & Zapier

When an alert fires, FullSession can deliver it through several channels, chosen when you create the alert.

Channels

Channel	How it works
In-app	A notification appears in your notification center (section 15.6)
Email	An email is sent to the recipients (see below)
Slack	Posts to a Slack channel via a webhook URL you paste in
Zapier	Sends the alert to a Zapier hook for downstream automations

The dialog presents these as preset choices — for example "Get notified via App and Email," "Get notified via App only," or "Disable App and Email notifications" — plus the option to send to Slack and send to Zapier.

Recipients

Email and in-app notifications go to the alert's owner and site admins by default. You can also add specific team members — "Add other team members to the email or in-app notifications" — and each recipient's app/email preference is respected.

Slack setup

Enable Slack and paste your channel's Webhook URL into the field. When the alert fires, FullSession posts a formatted message — the alert name, segment, threshold, the affected user count, and the date.

Zapier setup

Enable Zapier to send alert data to a Zap. The in-app dialog links you to a tutorial; the Zapier side of the connection is completed in Zapier itself, where the alert's data (operator, threshold, current/previous values, segment, site, and timestamp) arrives as the trigger payload.

Only Slack and Zapier are supported as outbound integrations for alerts — there's no generic custom-webhook field or mobile push.

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15.5 Notification Frequency & Limits

To prevent alert fatigue, FullSession lets you control how often a single alert can notify you.

Notify once vs. multiple

• Notify me only once (default) — you get a single notification when the condition is first met.

• Send me multiple notifications — you can receive repeated notifications, up to a daily limit you set (1–5 per day).

How limits behave

• An alert won't notify more than your chosen number of times per day.

• There's a built-in cool-down between notifications so you don't get a burst.

• If an alert hits its daily limit and isn't set to keep sending, it pauses itself for the rest of the day and resumes the next day automatically.

Tip — start with Notify me only once for most alerts. Reserve multiple notifications for conditions you genuinely want repeated reminders about.

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15.6 The Notification Center

In-app alerts (and other system notifications) collect in the notification center, opened from the bell in the top bar.

Billing events land here too. Plan changes, plan cancellations, and failed payments arrive as notifications in this panel — see [Chapter 17, section 17.9].

Tabs and overview

The panel organizes notifications into tabs, each with a count:

• All — everything.

• Unread — not yet read.

• Snoozed — temporarily set aside.

• Read — already handled.

A Mark all as read action clears your unread queue in one click. Each notification shows a severity (high / medium / low), a message, and a relative timestamp; some include a call-to-action link to jump to a relevant view.

Actions on a notification

Action	What it does
Mark as read	Moves it to Read
Mark as unread	Returns it to Unread
Snooze	Temporarily moves it to Snoozed
Unsnooze	Brings it back
Open (CTA)	Follows the notification's link, where one exists

Snooze applies to notifications, not alerts. You snooze an individual notification in this panel; there's no "mute this alert" toggle on the alert itself. To stop an alert entirely, disable it (section 15.7).

From an alert notification to the data

An alert notification names the segment and the threshold that triggered it. Note that there isn't a one-click jump from the alert into that segment's sessions — to investigate, open the named segment ([Chapter 11 — Segments]) and review its sessions there.

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15.7 Managing Alerts & Limitations

Managing alerts

Action	Notes
Create	Requires the create-alerts permission
Edit	Update the name, condition, threshold, delivery, and preferences — but not the alert type or segment
Enable / disable	Turn an alert on or off (it may auto-pause when its daily limit is reached)
Delete	Remove the alert and its Slack/Zapier hooks

To change an alert's segment or type, delete it and create a new one.

What alerts don't do

To set expectations clearly, these don't exist:

• No alerts on metrics other than segment user count (no error, frustration, conversion, funnel, feedback, or custom-event alerts).

• No alert-level snooze/mute (snooze is per-notification).

• No severity setting on alerts (severity appears on notifications generally).

• No alert duplication, templates, bulk actions, or escalation rules.

• No time-of-day scheduling (only the daily/weekly/monthly windows).

• No custom webhooks (Slack and Zapier only) and no mobile push.

• No test/preview send, and no one-click drill-in from an alert to its sessions.

The big picture — a FullSession alert watches one thing: the unique-user count of a segment, compared daily/weekly/monthly, as a Value, Relative Change, or Absolute Change condition. It's delivered in-app, by email, to Slack, or to Zapier, with per-alert frequency limits, and collected in a notification center with read/unread/snooze and severity. It's deliberately narrow — for error, conversion, and UX monitoring, lean on Dashboards, Funnels, and Lift AI.

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Next up: [Chapter 16 — Team & Account Management] covers the organization, users, roles, and the permission keys (like alerts:create and dashboards:edit) that have governed what each teammate can do throughout this manual.