Drift alerts
Set a tolerance per target and let Level tell you when a month runs away from plan — once per direction, once per threshold crossed, never twice for the same news.
A target nobody looks at is a target nobody notices breaking. Every target carries a drift threshold and an alerts switch, and Level checks them once a day.
Setting the tolerance
Open Alerts & threshold… from the row menu on the pacing screen, or set both fields when creating a campaign target:
| Field | |
|---|---|
| Drift threshold, % | How far the actual figure may wander from the plan before it counts as drift. Between 0 and 100; the default is 10 %. |
| Drift alerts | On by default. Off silences this budget without deleting the threshold. |
A tight threshold on a small account will fire often; 10–15 % is a reasonable starting point for most, tighter for accounts with steady daily figures and looser for ones that run in bursts.
Alerts follow the metric's own direction. A revenue target running Ahead of plan is good news and does not alert; the same drift on a cost target does. See Good news and bad news.
When an alert fires
The check runs once a day, in the morning, after the previous day's spend has fully landed — so the numbers it judges are a complete day, not a half-loaded one.
An alert goes out when a target drifts past its threshold on the bad side, and:
- it is the first alert for that target, or
- the direction changed — an account that was underspending is now overspending, or
- the drift deepened past another whole threshold — with a 10 % tolerance, drifting past 20 %, then 30 %.
Otherwise it stays quiet. "Still 12 % over, same as yesterday" is not news, and a daily repeat of it is how people learn to ignore an alert channel.
Who gets told
Everyone in the organization with the Manage Budgets permission.
Where it lands is up to each person's notification preferences — the topic is Budgets. In-app it always arrives; Telegram and Slack depend on the organization having a channel configured.