What each Pulse alert means

Every alert names a listing and a condition. This is what the conditions are and what each one is worth doing about.

A listing left active

The listing was live and now is not. Which state it moved to changes what it means entirely.

• Expired. The four month term ran out. It costs nothing to leave expired. Renewing costs Etsy’s listing fee, so this is a decision rather than a repair. See Refresh, renew, expire.
• Inactive. Someone deactivated it, most likely in Etsy. Worth checking it was deliberate.
• Draft. It went back to unpublished. Rare and usually deliberate.
• Removed. It is gone from Etsy. If that was not you, check your Etsy notifications, since Etsy removes listings that breach its policies.
• Sold out. It sold. This arrives as information, not a warning.

Only the first four are treated as adverse. A sale is not a fault, and an alert feed that says otherwise trains you to ignore it.

Views fell away

The listing was getting traffic and stopped. Usually search position rather than anything about the listing itself, since your listing did not change but the results around it did.

Worth checking in this order:

1. Is it still active? A listing that expired mid-period explains its own drop.
2. Did the drop follow an edit? Editing a ranking listing can cost it position. This is why bestsellers ask for a second confirmation before a prepared change is applied.
3. Is it seasonal? Demand for a Christmas design falls in January without anything being wrong.

If none of those apply, it is competition, and the answer is the listing itself: images, price, title.

Near expiry

Not a fault, a deadline. The listing renews or expires within days, and if auto renew is on you will be charged for the renewal whether or not the listing is earning. The refresh queue flags the ones with almost no views for exactly this reason.

Stagnant

Unchanged for a long time and earning nothing. Etsy takes recency into account, so a listing that has sat untouched competes against ones that have been worked on.

The fix is a genuine edit rather than a token one. Rotating tags is the usual move because it is free and reversible.

Opportunities

Not alerts. These are suggestions, most often a tag that similar listings in your shop carry and this one does not. Applying one is a real edit to a live listing, so it goes through the same approval as any other prepared change.

When several alerts arrive at once

Usually one cause. A batch of listings expiring together were created together four months ago. A shop-wide view drop is more likely to be seasonal or an Etsy search change than dozens of listings each developing their own problem.

Look for the common factor before working through them one at a time.

FAQ

Do alerts mean I did something wrong? No. Most describe things outside your control: a term ending, a season passing, competitors moving.

How quickly do alerts appear? Pulse works from the daily snapshot of your shop, so an alert can be up to a day behind the event.

Why did an alert appear for a change I made myself? Because the detector sees the state change, not the reason. Deactivating a listing yourself can raise an alert. Dismiss it.

Can I turn off a specific kind of alert? Not individually yet. Coach Mode controls the overall cadence.

An alert says views dropped but my analytics look fine. Alerts are per listing; the analytics page is per shop. One listing can fall while the shop holds steady, and that single listing is the one worth looking at.