Notifications and the inbox

What gets reported, when it runs, and how to narrow delivery to the things you care about.

Two different places

The inbox collects every event, whether or not you have set up delivery. It is the record.

The Notifications page is where delivery is configured: an address, which events go to it, which apps it covers and how big a drop has to be. Nothing is sent until you add an address there — and the inbox has a one-click strip that turns on delivery to your own sign-in address with a sensible default set.

An address that is not the verified sign-in address of someone in the workspace has to be confirmed first: it gets a link, valid for seven days, and receives nothing — no alerts, no weekly summary, no test message — until the link is opened. The row says Awaiting confirmation and offers Resend. A workspace can have up to ten delivery destinations.

What is reported

• Rank drop — a fall of at least the threshold you set.
• Rank rise — the same in the other direction.
• Entered the top ten, left the top ten, dropped out of the top fifty.
• Category chart move — five places or more, or entering or leaving the list.
• Your listing changed, and a competitor's listing changed.
• Installs band changed — yours or a competitor's Play install band moved, for example from 100,000+ to 500,000+.
• Your rating dropped — by 0.1 stars or more against a week earlier.
• Weekly summary, by e-mail.

Listing changes compare two full reads and cover four fields: title, short description, long description and release notes. The install band is Play's own threshold, not an estimate, and "100K+" and "100,000+" count as the same band. A rating drop is only raised for your own apps and only once per pair of values, so a lower rating that stays low is not reported every day.

When it runs

The daily pass runs at 09:00 UTC, after the nightly measurement has finished, so what you get is a complete day rather than a half-measured one.

Two things do not wait for it: a keyword you re-measure by hand, and a listing you fetch with Read now. Both deliver their events immediately, because you are standing in front of the screen waiting for them.

A manual re-measure always leaves a line in the inbox. A move below your threshold is written there as a note — for example #13 (was #12) — and is not sent to your addresses; before, a small move left no trace of the measurement you had asked for.

The daily check's rank moves for one app on one day are shown as a single inbox row — for example "12 drops · 8 rises · 2 left the top 10". Open the row to see every keyword; the dot on it marks the whole day as read. Listing changes, category moves and manual re-measures stay on their own rows. Nothing about what is detected or e-mailed changes; only the inbox groups it.

The weekly summary goes out Monday morning to the addresses that have that event switched on. Links in alert and summary e-mails open the panel at app.ersaso.com.

What the weekly summary carries

The Monday e-mail is a per-app digest rather than a list of events. For each of your apps it reports how many tracked keywords are in the top fifty and how many in the top ten, the three biggest rises and falls of the week, your ASO score with the first thing worth fixing, any listing changes detected in the last seven days, and your top three opportunities.

• Almost first page (#11-20) — how many keywords sit just outside the first page, counted on their latest position.
• Dead weight — measured, never seen in the top fifty, and popularity under 15: the same three conditions as the filter on the Keywords page.
• Visibility — the estimate with its change against a week ago, left out entirely until there is a week of history to compare with.
• What to do this week — up to three keywords just outside the first page (#11-20) with measured popularity, most popular first, each with the words missing from your title and short description (matched by root in the listing's language). When nothing is missing it says so and points to the keyword page's top 10.

Those counts use exactly the definitions the panel uses, so the summary and the screen never disagree with each other. It goes only to addresses that already have delivery switched on with the weekly summary event ticked — there is no separate subscription — and you can send one to yourself at any time from the Notifications page.

Narrowing it down

Each address has its own filters, so you can send rank drops to yourself and only the weekly summary to a colleague.

• Events — tick only the ones you want.
• Apps — leave empty for all of them, or pick a few.
• Favourites only — for keyword events, restrict to the keywords you starred.
• Rank drop threshold — how many places before it counts: one number, or per keyword (see below).

The same event is written to the inbox once even if both the daily pass and an instant trigger find it. Two different moves of one keyword on the same day are two events, though: a fall from #5 to #12 overnight and another from #12 to #20 after a manual re-measure are both reported.

A suggested drop threshold

Under the drop threshold field the page offers a number taken from your own pool: how far your keywords actually move on an ordinary day. Below that size a drop is usually Play's daily wobble rather than news, and a threshold under it mostly delivers noise.

It is built from measured ranks over the last 30 days. Each keyword with enough history contributes the size it stays under on nine days out of ten, and the suggestion sits just above the three-quarter mark of those — high enough to clear the routine movement of most of your pool without silencing the calmer half of it. When your keywords disagree with each other, it also names the range within which any choice would be defensible.

It is a suggestion, not a rule. Use it writes the number into the field; you still save the form yourself. It narrows to a single app only when you have selected exactly one, because averaging two apps with different volatility would describe neither.

With too little history it says so rather than guessing, naming how many of your keywords have a week of daily measurements and how many it needs. It can never propose less than three: one- and two-place moves are filtered out before an event is created at all, so a smaller threshold would promise something the rest of the system does not do.

Per-keyword thresholds

One number is a compromise: a keyword that sits still for weeks and one that swings five places every day are not alike, and any single threshold is wrong for one of them. Next to the threshold field each address can switch from One number to Per keyword.

• Each keyword gets its own threshold: one place more than the move it stays under on nine days out of ten, over the last 30 measured days — the same figure the keyword page shows under its rank chart.
• It never goes below three, and it applies to rises as well as drops.
• A keyword with less than about a week of measurements on consecutive days uses the number in the field, which becomes the fallback rather than a floor — so a calm keyword can alert on a smaller drop than the fallback.
• Top-10 entries and exits, and dropping out of the top 50, always alert in both modes.

It only narrows what is sent to that address. Your inbox still receives every rank event, and the keyword page shows the threshold that applies to that term. It is an estimate from measured ranks, not a promise that no real move will look ordinary.

→ How measurement works