Notifications
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Written by Tess
Updated over a week ago

This is the primary Notifications overview article.  If you need help with troubleshooting, check out the Notifications FAQ article here.
 

What Are Notifications?

Notifications are a way to have important information from a CrowdTangle Dashboard sent via e-mail or Slack to you or those around you.
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Why Would I Use Notifications?

  • If you want to know what your top overperforming posts have been every week

  • If you want Leaderboard data sent to your team before monthly ops reviews

  • If you'd like to identify high performing content in real-time

  • If you want to be notified when an influencer is linking to your content


How Do I Use Notifications?

Overview of Notifications:

Notifications can be created, edited, or deleted in the Notification section of CrowdTangle- which can be found in two places: either in the Notifications tab of a List or Saved Search or in the global Notifications section on the left-hand navigation bar.  

  

Notifications can come as e-mails or, in some instances, as messages to a Slack channel.  Each can be tied to specific Lists or Saved Searches, which means each is also tied to a specific Dashboard.  Notifications created from a List or Search's Notifications Tab will automatically be tagged to that List or Search.  Notifications created from the global Notifications section are not tied to any List or Search by default.  A notification can only pull from one platform at a time.  

  

Email notifications are sent from feedback@crowdtangle.com.  Some organizations may need to specifically white list that email address in order for notifications to bypass their spam filters.  Contact your IT department to be sure.

Note- only full Dashboard users can created or modify Notifications.  Read-only users are limited to subscribing themselves to existing Notifications.

Setting Up Slack Notifications:

NEW IN 2019, simply navigate to Notifications inside your dashboard then select a viral or referral alert and click "Add to Slack." This will redirect you to a Slack authorization screen where you can select the appropriate #channel to post to. If you want to change the channel at a later date, de-enable and Add to Slack button will re-appear and you can select a different #channel. 

If this is a brand new alert, you will not see the "Add to Slack" button until you click "Create & Subscribe."

Check out this article for step-by-step instructions.

You can do this for an unlimited amount of viral or referral alerts. However, this integration does not support digests or leaderboard notifications. 

Please note this is a replacement for the old Slack integration which used incoming webhooks. Luckily, this is way easier to set up!

Creating Email Notifications:

Naming Notifications: Each notification has both a name and a subject line.  When deciding on a name, be as specific as possible.  This will make it easier to differentiate between your notifications if you need to go back to adjust them later.  Likewise, it's important that the subject line and notification name match.  When someone receives an email notification, they will only see the subject line of the email.  If the notification name and email subject line do not match, it can make adding/removing people from them later very challenging.

 

Subscribing/Unsubscribing People to Notifications:  Once an email notification has been created, you can go back and use the Subscriptions section to add people to the notification.  Anyone can be added to a notification- regardless of whether or not they have a CrowdTangle account-, but it's important to let people know in advance that you will be adding them to the notification!  

 

If the slider next to someone's name is blue, that person is subscribed to the notification.  If the large slider next to the notification's name is blue, that means you are subscribed to it.  Clicking on either slider and making it grey will unsubscribe from the notification.

 

Scheduling Notifications:  Digests and Leaderboard Notifications must both be scheduled to send at particular times.  (Viral Alerts and Referral Alerts are not scheduled in advance, see below)  When scheduling a Notification you can choose to have it sent daily, weekly, monthly, on a rolling basis, or on a custom timeline.  

Selecting Rolling schedules the Digest to be sent every few hours Monday through Friday.  You can set the Notification to send every hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, or six hours.  You can also choose to have the Digest sent on weekends if you would like.
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Types of Notifications

There are four main types of notifications:

Digest

Click here to see an example Digest

Digests are used to send you or someone on your team a collection of posts based on time period, performance filters, and post type.  Classic examples of Digests include:

  • Top 10 Overperforming posts from your Pages/Accounts

  • Top 10 posts by Total Interactions from a competitive List

  • Overnight Breaking News Digest

Digests can be customized in a variety of ways:

Scheduling- Posts From One Year Ago

Digests are a scheduled Notification- which means they are sent at pre-determined intervals of time.  (See "Scheduling Notifications" above).  If you schedule a Digest to send daily, weekly, or at a custom time you will have the option of being sent posts from one year ago.  These digests are retrospective- instead of sending you recent posts, they will send you posts from the same time last year.  These can be powerful reminders of anniversaries of significant events, which can be important context for your current news cycle.  

Lists and Saved Searches

Digests must be tied to at least one Saved Search or List, but they can also be tied to a combination of Saved Searches and Lists.  In those cases, the Digest will aggregate the posts from each Search/List and will determine which to send based on the customizations under "Advanced Options".
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Advanced Options

Ranking Type: Digests will determine which posts to send based, in part, on the ranking type you choose.  The choices are identical to the Performance Filters under the Post tab in Lists and Saved Searches.  For more information on what these options mean, read our Posts and Post Analytics article here.

Type of Post to Include:  By default a Digest will send posts of any post type, but you can also have the Digest include only posts of a particular type.  That includes being able to choose specific types of Video posts or even to see only Branded Content (in a Facebook Dashboard).

Number of Posts: Digests will default to sending the top 10 posts based on the other options you've selected, but you can adjust that number as needed.

Minimum Interactions:  This gives you the opportunity to filter out content that hasn't met a certain threshold in terms of interactions.  This can be helpful when your Ranking Type has been set to overperforming or underperforming.

Custom Weights:  CrowdTangle gives you control over how the overperforming score is calculated for a particular notification.  You can either choose to completely remove certain types of interactions from the score, or you can choose to weight certain interactions more heavily.  This is useful in situations where you want to study content that's particularly strong at generating a specific type of interaction- like comments or shares.

 

Leaderboard

Click here to see an example of a Leaderboard Notification

Leaderboard Notifications are a way to send data from a Leaderboard directly to someone, instead of them having to come to the Dashboard for the information.  Classic examples of Leaderboard Notifications include:

  • A weekly ranking of you and your Affiliates by interaction performance

  • A monthly competitive update that ranks you against your peers

  • A market growth analysis

Unlike the Leaderboard Tab, Leaderboard Notifications focus on a single metric.  When you set up the Notification you can choose which metric you want to be sent:

Total Interactions: This is the default setting for Leaderboards and will rank the Pages/Accounts in the List or Search by the combined number of interactions their content has earned over a set period of time.

Interaction Rate: This will rank the Pages/Accounts by the Leaderboard Interaction Rate.  Unlike Post Interaction Rate, Leaderboard Interaction rate is calculated by dividing the Total Interactions a Page/Account earned over a specific timeframe by the number of Posts from that timeframe.  Then that is divided again by the average number of Page Likes/Account Followers the Page/Account had during that timeframe.  The final number is then converted into a percentage. 

Total Posts:  This metric will disregard the interaction data for a Page/Account's posts and will instead rank entirely based on the number of Posts from the timeframe.  

Account Size: This metric ranks by the number of Page Likes or Account Followers. 

Account Growth (Total): This metric will rank by the raw number of Likes/Followers each Page/Account gained over the timeframe of the Notification.

Account Growth (%): Unlike the metric above, this rank by the % of growth each Page/Account had in Followers/Likes over the timeframe of the Notification.  (New Likes/Followers divided by total Likes/Followers, converted into a percentage).

Video Views: This will focus the Leaderboard entirely on the number of video views each Page/Account earned over the timeframe of the Notification.

Send As Excel Report: Toggling this option on will send the notification as a .csv file, which allows you to easily combine the data with other sources of data if you're using a program like Excel.
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Viral Alert

Click here to see an example of a Viral Alert

Viral alerts are used to provide real-time notifications when content from a particular List or Saved Search hits a specified overperforming score- effectively notifying you when content is starting to go viral.

Viral alerts can be used to identify content for boosting or to keep an eye on developing stories your competitors have begun to cover.

Viral alerts can be customized in the following ways:

Minimum Score for Notifications: Viral alerts trigger when content from a List or Search reaches the overperforming score set here.  When first setting up viral alerts, it's advisable to start higher and move your way down if needed to prevent flooding your inbox with alerts.

Enable Slack: If you've set up Slack notifications in your Dashboard (see Slack Notifications at the beginning of this article) then you can set a Viral Alert to send a message to a specific Slack channel by turning on this toggle and entering the Slack channel name here.  (Be sure to include the # in front of the name)
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Advanced Options

Get Notified On Every Post: If you'd like, you can bypass the overperforming score threshold and instead have the viral alert trigger every time a new post comes out from any Page or Account on the List or Search tied to the alert.  This can be useful when using the Slack integration to track your content but can become overwhelming when used as an e-mail notification.

Skip Weekend Delivery: Viral alerts are not scheduled- they trigger whenever content hits a certain overperforming score.  You can opt to keep the alert from triggering during weekend hours, however.  

Custom Subject Line:  Viral alerts all have a default subject line, but you can customize the subject lines if you'd like.  It is highly recommended that you do this so you can identify which notifications are coming from which alerts.

Types of Posts to Include:  By default a Viral alert will send posts of any post type, but you can also have it include only posts of a particular type.  That includes being able to choose specific types of Video posts or even to see only Branded Content (in a Facebook Dashboard).

Minimum Interactions:  This gives you the opportunity to filter out content that hasn't met a certain threshold in terms of interactions. 

Custom Weights:  CrowdTangle gives you control over how the overperforming score is calculated for a particular notification.  You can either choose to completely remove certain types of interactions from the score, or you can choose to weight certain interactions more heavily.  This is useful in situations where you want to study content that's particularly strong at generating a specific type of interaction- like comments or shares.

Custom Weights- Facebook Live: If you've set the alert's post type to Facebook Live, you will also have the option of having CrowdTangle determine the post's overperforming score purely by video view metrics: either the total views (from the original post as well as shares) or only counting views from the original post.  You'll find these options under Custom Weights.
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Referral Alert

Click here to see an example Referral alert

Referral alerts are real-time notifications that trigger whenever new content matches the criteria for an existing Saved Search.  Typically these are used to notify you when someone has linked to your content.

To use a Referral alert for this purpose, you should first create a Saved Search for your publication's base URL.  Then, exclude a List of your own Pages/Accounts from the Search to be sure you only identify content from sources other than your own.

Once you've saved the Search, you can add it to a Referral alert to be notified when your content is being linked to by a Page or Account in the CrowdTangle database.  

There are a few ways you can customize this Notification further:

Enable Slack:  If you've set up Slack notifications in your Dashboard (see Slack Notifications at the beginning of this article) then you can set a Referral Alert to send a message to a specific Slack channel by turning on this toggle and entering the Slack channel name here.  (Be sure to include the # in front of the name)

Page Likes Threshold:  You can use this field to have CrowdTangle disregard Pages or Accounts that don't have a minimum number of Followers/Likes- which can help you hone in on influencers whose content is more likely to have an impact.

Skip Weekend Delivery: Referral alerts are not scheduled- they trigger whenever content hits a certain overperforming score.  You can opt to keep the alert from triggering during weekend hours, however.  

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