Website change monitoring
This page explains the two ways Advec watches your landing pages, and how to work with what it finds.
Two separate checks
Every monitored page, whether Advec found it from your ads or you added it, gets two checks that work independently:
| Page down | Visual change | |
|---|---|---|
| What Advec does | Requests the page and checks it responds | Loads the page in a real browser and takes a full screenshot |
| When it counts | 3 checks in a row fail: an error status or no response | The screenshot differs from the last one by 5% or more |
| What you get | An issue and an alert | A website change and a bell notification |
| How often | On your plan's schedule | Daily by default |
See how fast Advec checks for each plan.
When a page goes down
A page-down issue is critical when the page is linked to an active campaign — paid traffic is landing on a broken page — and operational otherwise. It goes to your alert channels like any other issue, and resolves itself on the first check that succeeds. A critical one that has alerted you sends a recovery notice when it does. Handle it from the issues inbox.
Reading a visual change
Open a client and click View changes under Website monitors. Each website change shows how much of the page changed as a percentage, when it was found, and before and after thumbnails. Click one to compare the two screenshots side by side. Small changes usually mean copy or image tweaks; large ones mean layout changes or a redesign — or a page that's broken outright.
A visual change never sends an alert to your channels. If a page starts returning an error or stops responding, the page-down check catches it.
Pages linked to campaigns
Monitors created from auto-discovered landing pages are linked to the campaigns whose ads point at them. That link is what makes both checks actionable: you can see which campaigns are sending paid traffic to the page, and it's what makes a page-down issue critical. To stop checking an auto-discovered page, click Manage next to its campaign in the client's reporting table and pause or remove it.
Seeing odd screenshots? Check Screenshots look wrong or missing.