Visual monitoring

Visual monitoring watches one specific part of a page and alerts you when its value or content actually changes. Point it at a price or a stock label, and you hear about that exact thing, not about every unrelated tweak elsewhere on the page.

Why it does not cry wolf

The difference is in how the change is detected. A pixel-comparison tool sees the whole page as an image and flags anything that looks different, including adverts, timestamps and carousels that are supposed to move. TLDTrack instead pins to the one element you chose, identified by its CSS selector, and reads only that element's value each time. In practice that means:

• An advert rotating, a date ticking over, or a background image swapping elsewhere on the page does not trigger an alert.
• The value you actually care about changing does trigger an alert.

Because it anchors to the element rather than a fixed spot on the screen, a monitor keeps working even when the page around it is rearranged, as long as its selector still finds the element. An area watched as a picture is compared pixel by pixel, so anything that moves inside that area counts as a change.

What to point it at, and the kinds of monitor

Visual monitoring suits any single, defined value on a page. When you set one up you choose what kind of thing it is watching, which tells TLDTrack how to read it:

• Text. A headline, a promotional banner, a phone number, an opening-hours line, or any other piece of visible wording.
• Price. A price figure specifically, so you hear about a price rise or a discount going live.
• Presence. Whether an element is on the page at all, so you catch a banner appearing, or a "sale" badge or cookie notice disappearing.
• Attribute. A hidden value attached to an element rather than its visible text, such as the file an image points at or the address behind a button. Useful for catching a swapped image or a changed link.
• Form fields. Whether fields on a form are added, removed or renamed, or the form starts sending to a new address.
• An area as a picture. A region you drag a box around, compared as an image, with an alert when more than 1% of it differs.

Whenever you find yourself thinking "I just want to know if that one thing changes", this is the check to use.

What you can configure

• The element itself. You choose the exact thing on the page to watch, and TLDTrack records its current value as the baseline to compare against.
• How often it runs. Each monitor has its own cadence: daily (the default), weekly, every 12 hours, every 6 hours, or hourly. Every check uses one visual credit, so a faster cadence uses more of your monthly allowance (see below).
• An optional alert condition. By default you are told when the thing changes. An element monitor can instead tell you when it has stayed the same for a set time, such as a stock count that should move every few days. A price watched from the browser extension can alert only when it goes up, or only when it goes down.

Setting one up, step by step

1. 1
   Open the website from your Domains list. If you have not added it yet, see Add your first website.
2. 2
   On the site's Content Checks tab, press Add a watch and choose Watch anything on a page. Scan the page, then click an element, drag a box around an area, or describe what to watch in plain English. The TLDTrack browser extension also lets you point at an element on the live page.
3. 3
   Choose what to watch about it, such as its text, its link destination, whether it is present, or the whole area as a picture. Check the rule wording, which is how alerts will describe it.
4. 4
   Set how often it should check, and whether to alert when it changes or when it stays the same.
5. 5
   Press Watch this. TLDTrack records the current value as the baseline, runs the first check within the hour, then checks on your schedule and alerts you when it changes.

What you will see, and what to do

Once set up, the monitor sits quietly and watches the element you chose. When its value changes, you get an alert that points at that specific thing, so you can open the page and confirm the new value immediately. Because it ignores everything around the element, an alert is a strong signal that the exact value you were watching has moved: a price rise, a product going out of stock, a swapped banner. From there you decide whether the change was expected or needs chasing up. If it was expected, Accept change makes the new version the baseline. For how these alerts reach you and who is told, see alerts and notifications.

Where to set this up

Good to know

• Element monitors read the exact element by its CSS selector, so churn elsewhere on the page, like adverts and carousels, does not trigger an alert. An area watched as a picture alerts on any visible change inside it.
• Every check uses one visual credit from your monthly allowance, whatever the cadence. Visual credits cannot be bought as top-up packs.
• To watch the broader wording of a page, or to apply one rule across many sites, see content checks.
• To watch a page's technical health, like analytics tags and JavaScript errors, see tracking and errors.
• Turning off the visual monitoring module in Settings hides its alerts for the whole team, which is different from switching off a single monitor.