AI Alerts: Contentsquare’s UX Anomaly Detection Extraordinaire

Lorraine Ryshin

February 15, 2019 | 4 min read

Last Updated: Feb 5, 2024


It may seem like a rhetorical question to ask, but have you ever wanted to be notified about the irregularities of your website? Whether it’s with your business metrics or user behaviors, things are bound to go amiss every now and then, and there ought to be more efficient ways to detect these setbacks.

Combing through a robust analytics report once a week is simply too wasteful of time and productivity to rectify issues as they arise. That’s where our AI Alerts function comes in. As its name suggests, AI Alerts is an AI technology powered by machine learning to deliver timely website anomaly notifications for your team.

So what exactly is AI technology? In the age of omni-digitalization, AI technology has come a long way since its formative era. It now encompasses machine learning, its progressive offshoot technology, comprised of computer systems that allow machines to automate their own improvements.

Thus, “machine learning,” in layman’s terms is the functionality of learning new things, which the machine in question can then absorb to alter its programming. The changes the machine makes with machine learning allows it to remediate its own mistakes, enhancing its overall performance.

Machine learning can be dutifully applied to software programs and enhance their adeptness. Together, AI and its more advanced subsidiary, machine learning, are a force to be reckoned with — and Contentsquare has taken notice.

What Is the AI Alerts Function and What Does It Do?

AI Alerts is a UX-savvy feature in the Contentsquare suite, built to understand how a website ticks. It familiarizes itself with how a site’s pages, zone behaviors and business metrics perform in a normal state, and thus how site users normally interact with them.

Injected into our UX analytics software, the AI Alerts function fortifies the entire system, notifying a business of any behavioral anomalies, but without the spammy, recurring messaging.

That’s because AI Alerts does not simply learn from the inner workings of its proprietary software. Instead, it was built to be in sync with any website that implements the UX software.

This machine learning feature also detects users’ deviations on engagement, as well as their struggles/frustrations. It’s able to differentiate how these metrics trend and fluctuate normally and when they are out of order.

In essence, the function detects user anomalies and any divergence from the norm. Based off of these inconsistencies, it sends out notifications in a timely manner to alert you. However, unlike other AI-based alerts, these will NOT bombard you with messages. Instead, the system is able to discern the appropriate instances for sending out the notifications.

Hypothetically speaking, say you are checking your weekly email campaigns; your conversion rates are bound to fluctuate dramatically. While regular alerts would likely fire a false alarm, AI Alerts can differentiate whether the fluctuation on that particular day is normal or straying from the norm.

Or, let’s say the elements of a particular page with usually high engagements have strikingly low ones. AI Alerts will inform you in a timely manner, as it is set to send alerts every 24 hours.

Additionally, if an occurrence on the Internet causes a spike in demand for a certain product or page, AI Alerts will send out a heads up. For example, if a major social influencer has linked to one of your products, leading to a sudden onslaught of shoppers checking it out, AI Alerts allows you to react to it. This can be done perhaps by creating a promo, or even simply by keeping an eye on the inventory.

How Do AI Alerts Know When To Notify You?

AI Alerts is not composed of a manual alerting system, yet it knows when to notify you. It is able to do this because, contrary to such a system,  it puts a machine learning model into practice. Machine learning, as aforesaid, carries a wealth of ingenuity that learns and improves automatically.

This machine learning capability enables the alerts to distinguish between the severity of the anomalies. Thus, AI Alerts is only set off when a website’s UX and business KPIs demand urgent attention. These allow for a quicker awareness and thus, speedier reactions on a number of critical issues that detract from conversions.

For example, AI Alerts identifies technical and usability anomalies, such as an unusually high visitor frustration on a page. This is vital for any marketing, analytics or e-commerce team to be made aware of, as this frustration often stops customers from making a transaction.

It works on both critical pages that deliver a substantial portion of overall conversions and revenue, and pages that are less trafficked day-to-day, but can be important when specific events occur.

How Does the AI Alerts Function Stand Apart From Other Similar AI?

  • AI Alerts uses an algorithm that detects what is right and what is awry without manual checkups.
  • It identifies technical and usability anomalies, which are also key to conversion. (404 error page monitoring, funnel transitioning between pages)
  • It doesn’t trigger false alarms.
  • It doesn’t require setting up thresholds.
  • AI Alerts prevents alert fatigue: getting assailed with notifications too frequently.

What Else Can Your Team Do with AI Alerts?

AI Alerts empowers both your team and your UX objectives beyond just showing you website engagement, technical and other types of anomalies. Firstly, its ease of use allows all your team members to leverage the AI to monitor what goes on in your website. Secondly, this AI-based system of notifications allows you to speed up reactivity, freeing up more of your time to focus on other crucial aspects of your content or business.

Additionally, AI Alerts does all the heavy lifting for you. This removes the burden of having to check reports and parse through a cluster of data. Instead, you have a machine curtailing the need to manually inspect the problems on your website.