When you create alerts for something like a goal and configure them to be sent via email or twitter direct messages (RIP), what you get is a short URL that will take you right to the visitor session details on Clicky. A handy, but manual, process.
We had a request today to allow the alert IDs to be passed straight to the analytics API so that automated processes could get more data about these visitors. We thought this was a great idea so hopped right on it, and this is now available.
Full details and some example code are in the docs, but briefly, if you extract the alert ID from the end of the URL then pass that to the API as alert_id=XXX, then we’ll look up the session ID (first verifying the session belongs to the site_id and sitekey you also pass in) and convert the request to be as if you had originally sent in a type=visitors-list&session_id=YYY request.
You need to know what you’re doing to implement automatic parsing of emails, but for the people who have the ability to do this, we think you will like this new feature quite a lot.
Here’s an example API request for an alert we have setup for our blog:
http://api.clicky.com/api/stats/4?site_id=32020&sitekey=71bf7c1681e22468&alert_id=18227240
