Email alerts when your website traffic spikes 3x
Simplytics emails you the morning after any of your sites does about 3× its usual traffic, with no threshold to configure. Turn on spike alerts once and every site on your account is watched; the email names the site, yesterday's views and the typical level.
Most tools that offer this ask you to pick a threshold first, which means knowing in advance what "unusual" looks like for each site and revisiting it as the site grows. Simplytics compares yesterday to the site's own recent baseline instead.
What exactly triggers an alert
An alert fires for a site when both of these are true for yesterday:
- yesterday's views are at least 3× the median of the previous 14 days, and
- yesterday had at least 100 views.
The 100-view floor stops a tiny site firing on noise (three views one day, ten the next is a 3× jump but not news). "Usual" is the median, not the average, with quiet days counted as zero, so steady growth never trips it: a site drifting from 100 to 150 views a day stays silent.
The rule applied to a few sites:
| Typical (14-day median) | Yesterday's views | Alert? | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 / day | 140 | Yes | ≥ 100, and ≥ 3× the median (60) |
| 5 / day | 120 | Yes | ≥ 100, and far past 3× (15) |
| 20 / day | 80 | No | under the 100-view floor |
| 50 / day | 140 | No | ≥ 100, but under 3× the median (150) |
| 200 / day | 300 | No | ≥ 100, but under 3× the median (600) |
The bar is whichever is higher: 100 views or 3× your normal day.
How often it can email you
At most one spike alert per site per week. After an alert, that site stays quiet for seven days while the new level settles into the baseline, so a busy weekend doesn't mail you every morning.
The exception is a spike that keeps climbing. If a site does 2× its alerted level again inside the quiet week, you hear about it early.
Turning it on
- Open the Account page.
- Turn on Email me when any site's traffic spikes.
That covers every site you track; there is no per-site setting or threshold field.
Spike alerts are separate from the weekly digest. Each email's one-click unsubscribe stops only spike alerts, so you can run one, both or neither. Both are cookie-less by design: the alert is built from daily aggregates, never from raw visitor records, which are deleted nightly.
How other tools handle it
| Simplytics | Plausible | Fathom | GA4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trigger | Automatic: 3× the 14-day median, ≥ 100 views/day | You set a current-visitor threshold (default 10) | None documented | You build a Custom Insight condition |
| Configuration | None | Per-site threshold | — | Per-metric condition |
| Timing | Morning after | Real-time, up to twice a day | — | On the condition you set |
| Drop alerts | No | Yes | — | If you build one |
Plausible's traffic-spike notifications watch current visitors against a threshold you choose (10 by default), send at most twice in 24 hours, and can also warn you when traffic drops — closer to real time, and a drop alert Simplytics doesn't offer. As of September 2026 Fathom sends scheduled email summaries but documents no spike alert. GA4 can email you through Custom Insights, but you write the anomaly condition yourself.
When another tool fits better
- It's a next-morning heads-up, not a live pager. It compares whole days, so it suits noticing a post got picked up, not reacting during the surge. For that, Plausible's real-time alert fits better.
- It can't be tuned. There is no custom threshold and no drop alert; the 3×-median rule is the only rule. A site that never reaches 100 views a day will never trip it.
What it costs
Spike alerts come with the only plan there is: $1/month, billed yearly ($12/year), against Plausible's $9/month for 10,000 pageviews. It covers 50,000 pageviews a month across up to 12 websites, with a 30-day free trial that needs no card. The tracker is a cookie-less ~1.8 KB script, and main analytics data is stored in the EU. See the Plausible comparison, the pricing page and the live demo.
Related: compare any period against the one before it to see whether a spike stuck, and put a live view counter on every post once one takes off.
Last verified: 2026-09-09.