Competitive Monitoring

Competitive monitoring is a Midesk capability that helps you monitor and extract data from various sources on the internet. It's facilitated via so-called "monitoring jobs". A Monitoring Job is a type of special website / API crawler that extracts various types of data and notifies on significant changes. This automates your repetitive work and saves your time!

Introduction

Overview Page

Click on Baselines › Competitive Monitoring to navigate to the overview page from where you can get a good overview about running monitoring jobs, latest values extracted from your target websites/APIs. It's also a place where you can create a new monitoring job.

Midesk Baselines Competitive Monitoring — Baselines Competitive Monitoring - Overview

Please look Quick Start for Monitoring Job to start monitoring your competition right now!

Manage Monitoring Job

You are able to manage each Monitoring Job. By clicking the symbols:

run jobs manually,
copy the monitored URL,
duplicate or
delete the job

Baslines Competitive Monitoring - Manage Bar Items — Manage Monitoring Job: run jobs manually, copy the monitored URL, duplicate, or delete

Filter your monitoring jobs. Search for name, URL, data type, ….

Baseline Competitive Monitoring - Search bar — Competitive Monitoring - Search bar

Create a new Monitoring Job

Start with a blank job or duplicate a Monitoring job:

Paste your URL
Choose a Data Repository. Or create directly a new Data Repository by tipping in the field.
Choose a Data Type. Or create directly a new Data Type by tipping in the field.
Set up your Notifications (see details below)
Choose a Crawler type (see details below)
Click "Create" to finish

Duplicate a Monitoring Job from an existing job and make changes you need. Use the symbol with (+)

Baseline Monitoring Job - Create a new — Create a new Monitoring Job

Further information follows on this page. Please go to Processing steps or Quick Start for Monitoring Job as well!

Notifications

Notifications are available for letting you know when there are changes on your monitored website. Notifications can come via mail to your registered email address. Midesk visualizes exactly what changed on your monitored website. It compares old to new. Midesk saves the old webpage data, so you can immediately see what changed.

All sent notifications are saved in the News Hub. An article is generated automatically by Midesk and you find it under "Saved News" › "Notifications". So we do not spam your email address and nothing gets lost.
„If Change > … %“ is useful for monitored numbers.
Take „Report every change“ if you want to know when there is any update on your monitored website.

Baselines Zoom Monitoring Job - Notifications — Chose a Notification for Monitoring Job

Baseline Comp Monitoring - CHANGE Notification — Example for a Change Notification by email

Crawler Type

There are two types of crawlers: a „normal“ Crawler and a Midesk Proxy Crawler:

Use the „normal“ Midesk Crawler for JavaScript websites
Use the Midesk Proxy Crawler if Midesk is caught by a captcha or other anti-crawling measures. This method uses a random proxy server around the world to disguise the Crawler

Baselines zoom Monitoring Job- Crawler Type — Chose a Crawler Type

Documentation

Baselines Hub

News Hub