Missing notifications when your favorite website publishes updates is a real let-down. Whether it's your top sports blog, social network products back-in-stock, or preferred streaming service, automated notifications are relied upon, but often let you down.

To take matters into your own hands, you can use Visualping. This is a website monitoring tool that will let you know when your favorite site updates.

Visualping has another advantage, however. It's also a super competitive intelligence tool, potentially providing a stunning competitive advantage for website and online business owners over their competitors.

That Website Updated and You Missed It

The obvious way to check whether a website has updated is to simply visit it.

Of course, that’s not really practical. No one has time to check a site every five minutes, meaning you can easily miss changes when they happen. But with a checking tool like Visualping, the articles, headlines, images, and more, can be spotted. This has multiple purposes, from blogs to online newspapers and even wiki pages. For example, if new information is added to a Wikipedia entry about your favorite pop group, Visualping can monitor this change and report it to you.

Visualping

Visualping is a way to receive notifications updates when a site you want to keep tabs on updates. However, it’s a powerful tool that has far more possibilities than that.

How Does Visualping Work?

The idea is simple. Visualping takes a snapshot of a specified URL, then checks it periodically to find any changes. You can check for changes of text, images, blocks, and alter the definition. For example, a small 1% change can be alerted, as can larger updates of 10%, 25%, and 50%. Each Visualping "job" is given a name and you can set actions. You can also make adjustments, such as setting a proxy to get a localized version of the website or disabling JavaScript on the target website. You can even use pre-action tools to tell Visualping how to fill in a form, click on certain buttons, or monitor password-protected websites.

With the specifics set, Visualping then takes snapshots of the selected URL. A period between snapshot checks can be set, although some of these delays are limited to the Visualping paid version.

Visualping provides notifications when changes are made. You can receive notifications in many ways, including via text, Slack, and API. All changes found on a site are highlighted within the notification itself.

Visualping and Competitive Intelligence

Visualping has uses beyond checking your favorite websites. It delivers a type of strategic advantage called "competitive intelligence" to anyone that needs it by providing additional information with those updated website notifications.

Pursuing strategies based on competitive intelligence can often mean hiring a specialist. But with a tool like Visualping, much of the work can be automated, with only analysis of the data required.

Visualping

A website change detection tool like Visualping can be used in business to monitor competing organizations. Everything from marketing messages and social pages and SERP rankings can be monitored. A Visualping account will let you evaluate these developments and make any competitive decisions necessary.

Meanwhile, if you run a business offering products or services and are concerned about your competitors, Visualping can be used to look for attempts to undercut your pricing. New features introduced by other businesses in your sector can be quickly highlighted, investigated, and potentially improved upon.

As you’ve probably already realized, competitive intelligence can help you not only see what your competitors are doing, but also what they’re not doing. This gives you an opportunity to leverage the competition’s missed opportunities for your own purposes.

How to Check a Website With Visualping

When you head to visualping.io you can input the URL of the site you wish to monitor. Click Go when the URL is entered then wait for the web page image to be made. You'll then be able to adjust the capture area to cover the section of the page you want to monitor. The whole page might be observed for changes or just a small portion.

Visualping

Next, add the email address where you want notifications to be sent, along with the frequency. One email every day is the default option. Set a name for the alert, make any necessary tweaks (see below) then click Start Free Monitoring.

Visualping

Use the different monitoring options to detect specific types of change. These are set as Visual, Text, and Element. Each comparison type is as good as the other but are tailored for precise purposes. For example, you can look for changes to text, analyze alterations in the underlying element code, or observe alterations at a purely visual level.

The depth of options available here is considerable. Indeed, you can find tiny changes and large changes, with notifications in your inbox previewing the differences without you even needing to open Visualping or the target website.

Visualping: The Competitive Intelligence Solution You Didn’t Know You Needed

With a free option and the ability to report when a website has updated, Visualping is a useful service that hides great power within. You’re really only scratching the surface of this tool if you’re using it to catch news updates. Instead, it can be embraced to monitor all of your competitors.

The potential here is incredibly powerful. In the business of online news? Your resource monitoring practices can be vastly overhauled with Visualping on your side. Blocked by an account on Twitter? It can monitor for updates that you might be interested in.

Want to get ahead of your online competitors? You need Visualping set up to catch their updates so you can exploit what they missed.