- Why configure alerts
Alerts let you react in under 24 hours to a critical event instead of finding the problem at month-end when you crunch your numbers. Three common scenarios:
Budget drift. A campaign with poorly calibrated bids can burn 3 days of budget in 4 hours if a competitor pulls out or if a broad-match keyword suddenly becomes relevant for a viral search.
Conversion drop. A tracking bug, a landing page returning a 500, or a Google policy change can crash your conversion rate by 80% with no warning.
Account offline. Payment declined, expired card, policy violation: your campaigns can be paused by Google with no explicit email. An alert guarantees you know within the hour.
- The 8 available alert types
Each alert ships with a default threshold calibrated against Google Ads benchmarks, that you can tune. Here's the full list:
1. Day-over-day budget drift
default: +50%Alerts if a campaign's spend grows by more than X% versus the 7-day rolling average.
2. Conversion drop
default: -40%Alerts if conversions drop by more than X% over 48h vs the 14-day rolling average.
3. CPA above target
default: +30%Alerts if your CPA exceeds the target defined in the bid strategy for more than 3 consecutive days.
4. ROAS below target
default: -20%For ROAS-based strategies, alerts if the ratio falls below the threshold for 3 days.
5. Unexpected top-spend keyword
default: top 5 rankAlerts if a keyword that wasn't in the top 10 spenders suddenly enters the top 5.
6. Campaign taken offline
real-timeImmediate alert as soon as a campaign moves to paused, suspended or removed status — outside any manual action of yours.
7. OAuth error
real-timeImmediate alert if the refresh token of a Google/Bing Ads account becomes invalid (expired, revoked, rights changed).
8. Critical recommendation not applied
default: 7 daysWeekly reminder for critical-priority recommendations not applied for X days.
- Setting thresholds
Head over to
/dashboard/settings/alerts.
The page shows the 8 types with their current threshold and an
Enabled / Disabled toggle.
- Click a row to expand the edit panel.
Adjust the threshold via the slider (greyed out = disabled). Recommended values are marked with a green tick.
If the alert supports it, set the scope: all campaigns, only certain campaigns, or a specific label.
Click "Save". Changes take effect within 5 minutes.
A +10% threshold on budget drift will send you an email a day — normal fluctuations are plus or minus 15-20%. Start with the default values, then tune after 2 weeks of observation.
- Sending frequency
You have 4 options to control email throughput:
| Frequency | Max delay | Use case |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time | < 5 min | Emergencies (OAuth, account offline) |
| Hourly digest | 1 h | Tight monitoring during a launch |
| Daily digest | 24 h | Default — one email/day at 8am |
| Weekly digest | 7 d | Low-activity accounts or passive management |
You can set the frequency per alert type. In practice, most users put "real-time" on emergencies (OAuth, offline) and "daily digest" on everything else.
- Recipients and roles
By default, alerts go to the SteerAds account owner's email. You can add extra recipients (max 10 per workspace):
"Admin" role — gets every alert from every connected account.
"Editor" role — gets alerts for the accounts in their scope (assigned by the admin).
"Reader" role — gets no alerts by default. You can enable them explicitly per recipient.
For teams, create an alias like
ads-alerts@yourcompany.com
and point the alert there. You can then route the email to a ticketing
tool or your internal system via your MTA.
- Targeted disabling and snooze
Sometimes an alert is temporarily useless without you wanting to fully disable it (campaign in test phase, exceptional event like Black Friday). Three options:
Snooze 24h — from the alert email, "Snooze 24h" button. No alerts of this type for this campaign for 24 hours.
Hide per campaign — from
/dashboard/settings/alerts, multi-select campaigns to exclude for this alert type.Pause globally — toggle off the alert type. Re-enable manually (no auto-reactivation).
- Webhook for your tools
To wire alerts into your internal systems (in-house ticketing, data warehouse, custom alerting), SteerAds exposes a public webhook that posts a JSON payload on every alert fired.
Go to
/dashboard/settings/webhooks, set the HTTPS destination URL where SteerAds should post the alerts.Pick the payload type (alerts only, or alerts + applied actions), plus an HMAC secret to verify request authenticity on your side.
The payload includes: campaign, impacted KPI, signal magnitude, root cause, direct link to the proposed corrective action. Stable, versioned format.
Full payload schema documentation in
/docs/api/webhooks.
- Best practices
Max 5-8 active alerts. Beyond that, fatigue kicks in and you risk ignoring the ones that actually matter.
Tune thresholds after 2 weeks — you'll have a better sense of your account's background noise.
Separate emergencies (real-time) from diagnostics (daily digest). Don't put everything in real-time.
Review the config every quarter. Patterns evolve: an alert useful in Q1 can become noise in Q3.