Trackingplan watches the traffic of every destination and raises a warning when something breaks or changes: an event stops, a property goes missing, a value changes type, consent is not respected. Updates tell you what is new, such as a new event or a new release. You find warnings in each destination and tune them in Settings & Members > Warnings.
Where you see warnings
Each destination, under Destinations in the menu, has a Warnings table with its warnings. The Consent screen, under Compliance, has the consent warnings. Each warning shows its type, the elements it affects, a description, when it was last seen and how long it has been active.
The tabs filter by state: All, Ongoing, Muted and Resolved. To investigate one, see Investigate a Warning.
Traffic Warnings
Trackingplan spots unusual changes in your event traffic in production and flags every significant one, whatever the cause: an implementation bug, an unexpected change in user behavior, or an intended code change.
These are the traffic warnings you get automatically:
Missing Events
If an event in your tracking plan gets no traffic at all for a full day, Trackingplan tells you. The missing event warning shows up the next day in your Digests and your Dashboard.
Click the warning to open the Warning Management View and see what is behind it.
There, the Daily Traffic Chart shows how the event’s traffic has evolved, so you see the impact at a glance.
You can also add notes to track its progress with your team. To turn off missing event warnings, go to your Warning Settings.
Traffic Drops
Event traffic changes naturally between weekdays and weekends, on special dates and during campaigns. That is why we monitor event traffic relative to your user traffic.
For example, an add_to_cart event might fire for 0.1-1% of your daily users. If that suddenly falls to 0.05%, we tell you, so you can rule out a problem. The cause might be a bug in the funnel, a redesign, or business and marketing activity: a campaign can bring in users who convert or behave differently, and Trackingplan flags the unexpected drop in hits.
The model learns your typical user behavior from your historical traffic: how often users trigger each event, and how much that varies by day and by week. So monitoring gets better over time and keeps adapting to your tracking changes.
You can turn traffic drop warnings off, or choose how easily they trigger with a low, medium or high tolerance. Learn more about Traffic Warning Tolerances.
Traffic Peaks
Some events are bad news when they go up, such as abandoned_cart. That is why Trackingplan also alerts you about unusual traffic peaks.
Traffic peak warnings stay off until you turn them on. Switch them on for the events, campaigns, landings or other acquisition dimensions where an increase matters to your business, from your Warning Settings.
As with drops, you can turn traffic peak warnings off at any time, or set how easily they trigger with a low, medium or high tolerance. Learn more about Traffic Warning Tolerances.
Custom Thresholds
Trackingplan proposes predefined alerts based on your business type. You can also set your own daily thresholds, above or below, so you are alerted only when your conditions are met.
You set this warning event by event.
The same traffic warnings work for Acquisition too: Campaigns, Landings, Referrers, Mediums, Sources and Pages. Hover over the item you want to watch closely and click Customize Warnings.
Real-Time Traffic Anomalies
With Real‑Time Traffic Anomalies, you catch important traffic problems as they happen.
Performance and acquisition teams, campaign managers and anyone who checks the numbers every day can’t wait until tomorrow to learn that an event or a campaign failed. Real-time monitoring watches ongoing trends and tells you about unexpected deviations, so you can react straight away.
You turn on Real-Time Traffic Anomalies on an event-by-event basis, so you set it up only for the events that matter most to you. Click Warning Settings to start.
Pro tip: to see which events have real-time warnings set up, filter events by “Warning Settings: customized by user”. You see at once where real-time warnings have been adjusted.
The switch for Real-Time Traffic Anomalies is at the top of your Warning Settings.
When you turn it on, this dialog opens.
Here you set the tolerance levels for drops and peaks, and decide whether to normalize by user volume:
- Traffic drop tolerances: choose between five tolerance levels to set how sensitive your real-time alerts are:
- Disabled: no traffic drop warnings for this event.
- Max (Fewer Warnings): alerts only in extreme cases, for the fewest notifications.
- High (Lenient): alerts only for significant deviations. Good for less critical events, such as optional interactions, where small fluctuations don’t matter.
- Medium: a balanced approach: fewer false positives, and it still catches meaningful anomalies.
- Low (Strict): for critical events, where even small deviations matter.
- Min (More Warnings): alerts even for smaller variations, when you want maximum coverage and to catch every deviation.
Pro tip: stricter tolerances mean more alerts; looser ones mean less noise. Use the Detection Forecast to preview how a tolerance level will behave before you settle on it.
- Traffic peak tolerances: the same levels, applied to unexpected traffic spikes.
You can also turn peak alerts off entirely and get notified only about unusual drops. Try different tolerances until you find the setup that suits your team.
- Normalization: takes user volume into account, so normal changes in traffic, like campaigns or seasonal events, don’t set off false alerts.
- On (normalized by user volume): recommended for catching integration problems. Event traffic is compared with user volume, so expected increases (from marketing campaigns or Black Friday sales, say) don’t trigger false alerts.
- Off (raw event traffic): recommended for catching business-related anomalies. It uses raw event traffic and ignores user volume, so you can spot unusual patterns in your business metrics.
Pro tip: choose On to catch technical or implementation problems, and Off if you care more about business-level traffic changes.
Detection Forecast
The Detection Forecast updates as you adjust your tolerance levels, so you see straight away what would trigger an alert and what wouldn’t.
- Green line: Your actual hits
- Grey band: Upper and lower thresholds, which will shift as you modify tolerances
Think of it as a sandbox for your alerts: try different settings, see the effect at once, and get recommendations to fine-tune your real-time warnings.
Real-Time Notifications
Once set up, these warnings work like any other in Trackingplan. When an anomaly is detected, a warning appears in your dashboard: open it to debug, and check later whether it persists or has been resolved.
You shouldn’t have to watch the dashboard all day to stay protected. That’s why Real-Time Traffic Anomalies lets you choose who gets notified, so important problems reach you while you get on with your work.
Send real-time alerts to specific team members, to Slack or Teams channels, or leave recipients blank:
- Email: notify specific team members or whole departments directly.
- Slack or Teams: send alerts to a channel so more people see them. Here’s how.
- No recipients: leave it blank to see alerts only in your Trackingplan panel, with no email or Slack notifications.
Note: no flood of emails: only one email is sent per anomaly. If the anomaly comes back after being resolved, you get a fresh notification after 24 hours.
KPI Warnings
Define your KPIs in Trackingplan and you can tell whether the data behind them is reliable, and stand behind your reports. When a KPI varies in an unusual way, Trackingplan raises a warning automatically.
KPI warnings work like the traffic warnings above, applied to your daily KPI values. These are the KPI warnings you get:
Missing KPI values
Trackingplan tells you when any of your KPIs has no values for one or more days.
Click the warning to open the Warning Management View and see what is behind it.
You can also add notes to track its progress with your team, mute or share the warning, or turn off missing KPI value warnings.
You can also customize the traffic threshold and fine-tune KPI tolerance levels to set how sensitive anomaly detection is: less noise, more of what matters. Learn more about Traffic Warning Tolerances.
KPI value drops
Trackingplan tells you when it detects a significant drop in your KPI values.
KPI value peaks
It also raises a warning when it detects a significant peak in a KPI value.
Custom Thresholds
Trackingplan proposes predefined alerts based on what it learns from your data. You can also set your own daily thresholds, above or below, so you are alerted only when your conditions are met.
- KPI Value Below Daily Limit: Triggered when the KPI value falls below a user-configured threshold.
- KPI Value Above Daily Limit: Triggered when the KPI value exceeds a user-configured threshold.
Click the warning to dig deeper.
Trackingplan also flags a KPI with a warning when the events behind it have warnings.
Specification Warnings
Trackingplan also tells you when your properties, events and acquisition data don’t follow the rules you set, or the ones Trackingplan inferred for you.
These are the specification warnings you get automatically:
Missing Properties
You can mark a property as required in an event. If a required property is not tracked in every hit of that event, Trackingplan sends you a warning.
For specification warnings, the Warning Management View is where you start, with two complementary views:
The Overview tab gives you the big picture of specification health. The chart shows the daily rate of specification matches vs. mismatches, including warnings raised by required constraints in your specifications. It helps you spot trends, spikes and recurring problems quickly.
To dig deeper, the Warning analysis tab explains each specification warning in clear, plain language. It tells you what is happening, why it is happening, and what to do about it, so you don’t spend hours reviewing raw tracking data.
Warning analysis is one of the plan’s AI features, which are managed for the whole plan in the AI Features settings.
For the AI Debugger and how to use it, see its documentation.
Missing property warnings are fully customizable. Set a tolerance percentage: how often a property may be missing before a warning is raised. Some properties are legitimately absent from a small share of events, and this keeps your warnings true to how your tracking really behaves.
To find out why a property, even an optional one, doesn’t arrive 100% of the time, use Find Correlations. Learn all the details here or watch the video below:
Conditionally Missing Properties
Trackingplan also tells you about missing hits on the pages you set as required with a conditional.
A “conditional” property is useful for events that fire on many different pages. It lets the same property be required or nullable, depending on its value.
For instance, the event page_view usually fires on many different pages. With a conditional on the property page_type you can set only the ‘home page’ and the ‘checkout page’ as required and leave the rest nullable. Trackingplan then tells you only about missing hits on the pages you marked as required, so your requirements are much more precise.
You get more control over your tracking requirements, and you focus on the data that matters most.
Learn more about Conditional Properties here.
Forbidden Properties
This warning is raised when a property appears in an event but isn’t in that event’s list of expected properties.
So if an event should carry 4 specific properties and Trackingplan sees an extra one that isn’t in the specification, it raises a warning.
You can enable Forbidden Properties warnings either individually per event or globally for your entire plan.
Once it’s on, any new property in an event raises a warning instead of being marked as new.
Important note: before you turn on Forbidden Properties, make sure Trackingplan has finished its auto-training and has learned your real traffic patterns.
Turn it on too early and Trackingplan treats only the properties and destinations it has already seen as valid. That can lead to misleading warnings, or to missing data later on.
For example, if some destinations, events or properties you care about haven’t had traffic yet and you enable Forbidden Properties before Trackingplan has detected them, they may later be treated as forbidden or not appear as expected.
Best practice: turn this setting on only once your tracking has been stable for a while and Trackingplan has seen traffic for every relevant event, property and destination.
Type Collision
The property is there, but with a different type. Trackingplan works out which data type each property carries and raises a warning when it sees a type collision.
You can customize this warning too, with the tolerance percentage you want.
Validation errors
Raised when a property, event or UTM parameter doesn’t match the values you specified.
- Validation enum warnings: raised when a property carries a value outside the list of constants you defined. If the value is valid and you simply left it out of your Enum, you can update the specification straight from the Warning Management View.
You can learn more about how to validate property values with Enums.
- Validation regex warnings: raised when a property value doesn’t match the regular expression (Regex) that every value of that property must follow.
Learn more about how to validate property values with regular expressions.
- Validation function warnings: raised when a property doesn’t pass the function you provided to validate an event.
Learn more about function validations.
- Campaign validation warnings: raised when the UTMs of your campaigns don’t follow your campaign naming specifications.
Learn more about campaign validation.
Recommended Specs Warnings
Trackingplan also applies the event and property specifications your analytics and marketing tools recommend, and raises Specification Warnings when your sites or apps don’t implement them correctly.
For now, Google Analytics 4 Recommended Events, Meta Standard Events, and TikTok Parameters and Standard Events are supported, with more coming soon. Contact support to tell us which tool you’d like next.
Consent Warnings
Trackingplan alerts you automatically about consent violations (data sent without proper consent) and about sudden changes in consent acceptance rates. You see how consent affects your data collection, and you catch problems before they hurt your analytics or your legal standing.
These are the consent warnings you get automatically:
Consent Violations
Trackingplan keeps observing your data to learn its patterns, and adapts as your digital stack evolves.
For consent, it evaluates each cookie over a self-learning period:
- If consent is consistently granted above a certain threshold during that period, the cookie is classified as “Consent Required.”
- If Trackingplan sees no consent activity for a cookie during the learning period, the cookie is classified as “Consent optional.”
So Trackingplan works out which cookies need consent without any manual setup. You can always override its decision and set any cookie to require consent or not.
Once a cookie is classified as "Consent Required," Trackingplan checks every session for compliance. A consent violation is raised when:
- A cookie marked as “Consent Required” is detected without a corresponding user consent signal.
- A cookie that previously required consent suddenly stops receiving traffic under consented conditions.
These violations point you quickly to misconfigurations in your CMP, tagging problems or inconsistent consent signals, so your tracking stays compliant and in line with what users chose.
To dig deeper, the Warning Analysis tab explains the warning in clear, plain language, based entirely on its debug warning data.
Daily Consent Acceptance Changes
Beyond single violations, Trackingplan also watches the overall consent acceptance rate of your website every day, so you catch unexpected shifts that could mean a problem with your consent experience.
It tracks the percentage of users who accept, reject or ignore consent each day, sets a baseline from your history, and alerts you when:
- The acceptance rate drops significantly below the expected baseline (e.g., a sudden 15% drop in consent acceptance).
- The rejection rate spikes unexpectedly: more users than usual are actively opting out.
- There is an unusual change in the share of users who don't interact with the consent banner at all (the banner may not be rendering properly).
Learn more about Cookie and Consent Monitoring here.
Destination Implementation Warnings
Every destination we integrate with has its own quirks and limits. They are usually well documented, but the integrations themselves have few controls, so it’s hard to notice when data isn’t collected or errors happen.
That’s why Trackingplan tells you automatically when a provider has been implemented wrongly.
Google Analytics Implementation Warnings
Trackingplan sets up a first set of validation functions for you, to check certain values and their limits in Google Analytics.
These rules turn on automatically as soon as Trackingplan sees hits for that provider:
- URL length: checks that the Google Analytics endpoint URL stays within its limits.
- POST payload size: checks that the POST payload sent to Google Analytics stays within its size limits.
You can turn off Google Analytics Implementation Warnings in your settings at any time, and see more about each problem in the Warning Management View.
Possible Warning Use Cases
- Events Stop: several events stop with a new release of your website or app, so your analytics implementation may have a bug. Trackingplan shows you which events were affected on which landings or pages, so you can fix them quickly.
- Conversion Funnel Breakage: sales drop sharply in a short time, so something in your conversion funnel may be broken. Trackingplan helps you find exactly where potential customers leave the funnel.
- Source Traffic Increase: traffic from one source goes up. Trackingplan helps you see where and why, from the moment it happened.
- Geographical Traffic Decrease: traffic from a location or country goes down. Trackingplan shows you quickly which area dropped, so you can look into what is affecting that market.
- Payment Gateway Drop: the conversion rate of your payment gateway falls 10% below normal. You may be getting low-quality traffic, or some products may have pricing problems; Trackingplan gives you a roadmap to start investigating.
- User Navigation Changes: users start navigating to unexpected pages, and your funnel may need work. The Trackingplan dashboard shows how behavior changed, through the rises and falls in your events and properties.
Trackingplan proposes predefined alerts based on your business type. You can also configure alerts so you only get warnings when your conditions are met. Learn more about customizing warnings.
Updates
Trackingplan also tells you in real time about every change in your tracking, and monitors it, so you know each update to your analytics is implemented correctly and consistently across your organization.
- Active new events - an event receives hits for the first time.
- New properties - a property receives hits for the first time.
- New pixels - a SaaS tool used in your frontends reports a new pixel for the first time.
The chart at the top of each destination marks the new releases Trackingplan discovers and the new events of each day; hover a mark to see them. See Releases & GTM Monitoring.
Tune warnings for the whole plan
Open the plan selector at the bottom of the menu, click Settings & Members, then Warnings. For each warning type, turn it on or off and choose its tolerance: Low, Medium or High for traffic drops and peaks, and a percentage for property and consent warnings. The higher the tolerance, the fewer warnings you see.
Two more options:
- Automatically infer Enum from property values, for properties with a limited set of values.
- Automatically forbid new properties, to mark any newly discovered property as forbidden.
Customize warnings for one event
Open a warning and click Customize Warning in its header. Warning Settings lets you change, for that event only, the real-time traffic anomaly detection, the daily hit limits, and which warnings to show with which tolerance. To edit the settings of all events at once, use the link at the top of the dialog.
Mute a warning
When a warning isn’t a real problem for you, mute it: click Mute Warning in its header, or Quick fixes > Mute warning. It moves to the Muted tab.
Get notified
In Settings & Members > Digests & Notifications, Allow real-time email notifications lets each event send its own email notifications to the recipients set for it. Audits can also notify by email or Slack; see Audits.