Hexowatch Webinar & Transcription
[00:00:01.110] – Lindsay(AppSumo)
What is going on, Sumolings, thank you so much for joining us for another product walk through webinar. I am Lindsay and today I am joined by the team over at Hexowatch which lets you effortlessly monitor competitor Web pages for changes in visual keywords, source codes, prices and more. It is starting at ninety eight dollars for a lifetime deal right now in AppSumo. But before we dive into the walkthrough, I just want to tell you all a few quick things.
[00:00:30.300]
First, if you want to tell us a little bit about your case, why you are interested in this tool, you can go ahead and do that over in the chat room. If you have any questions about the tool, the deal, how to get set up, go ahead and leave those questions in the Q&A box down below this video. And then we will circle back to those at the end of the walkthrough. And the last thing is that there will be a replay of this available.
[00:00:52.590]
So if you need to step out, you want to watch this, we can let you sleep at night. If you do that so many times you want, it’ll be available shortly after we are done recording.
[00:01:01.590]
All right. That is it for me. Hey, Chris, how are you doing? Hi, Don. How are you?
[00:01:06.960] – Chris(Hexowatch)
I am doing well.
[00:01:08.370] – Lindsay(AppSumo)
I’m glad to have you here. I’m going to go ahead and pass this over to you for the walkthrough. Let me know when you’re ready to take some questions.
[00:01:15.210] – Chris(Hexowatch)
Awesome. Sounds good. Thank you. So I’m just going to do a quick screen shot so you can see my dust up, so.
[00:01:26.210]
Hi, I’m Chris. I’m the CMO and co-founder of Exact Inc. So you may have heard from us previously. We were on ABC last year with hexameter and today we’re talking about Exar, which so Hazlet, which is a page change monitoring platform. And today I’m going to be walking you through some use cases and how you can use it in your business to save time and keep one step ahead of your market and competitors. So, oh, yeah, quick thing before I get started.
[00:02:09.280]
We we just upgraded our UI last night, so if you log in today, the UI looks a little bit different than it did on the showcase video on Ximo and some of the screenshots.
[00:02:26.830]
So just bear that in mind.
[00:02:30.190]
So anyways, here is the new UI that we’ve rolled out, so. Access, which enables you to do a lot of stuff, so we have nine different monitoring types, and let’s go through some of these top level right now and then we’ll go through how to use them. So the visual monitor is really good if you want to check for visual changes on a page. So here, let’s go for an example here, and I’ll tell you how that can be really useful in your business.
[00:03:12.140]
So let’s say you want to check. Explain it says that as an example.
[00:03:23.770]
And what we’ll do is when you click preview our servers, fetch the page, and then you can do lots of cool stuff, you can choose to monitor that page for visual changes across the whole website, the whole Web page, or you can select a specific section of the page. But that’s not all.
[00:03:51.190]
You may encounter situations, for example, when you have pop ups, you may have elements on page that you don’t want to monitor. So what you can do in this instance is you can use our customs actions feature here and here. You can do some really cool stuff. You can click on any element of the page, you can type in stuff. So, for example, if you have a password protected page, you can fill out your details, log in and then monitor that page behind a password.
[00:04:25.180]
You can add a delay. You can block certain elements from appearing on the monitor. That page you can refresh or set cookies. So this is really cool for situations like, for example, you’re monitoring a competitor’s product page. They have a say, a special of a pop up that comes up. You can remove that and focus simply on, say, the area with the price, the area with the description, and then you can get notified whenever they make changes to their pages.
[00:05:02.500]
The Visual Monitor has the ability to check a page as a different type of device than just the desktop. So you can check as a mobile device, a tablet, a desktop.
[00:05:15.580]
This is really useful for agencies who manage website development builds. For example, you can use this before and after doing deployments and you can see if, for example, the page looks different than it used to before. We find a lot of our clients find this really useful when they’re updating their WordPress or commerce websites. You tend to have updates every other week so this can catch issues on key pages. So my recommendation is that if you have a website that gets frequent updates, deploy a visual monitor on your home page on some of your product pages, your blog, and it will literally let you know if something is right.
[00:06:08.290]
Next up, let’s see what else can we do so we can choose how sensitive a check is. So, for example, on some pages, you sometimes have little things which change. You’re not that interested in that. So what you can say is I am only interested if there’s a 10 percent, 30 percent extra change in that page.
[00:06:31.870]
Depending on your scenario, you can choose to check pages every month if it’s a front page and you want to be really on the goal, you can check every day, every hour, even down to five minutes on our business plan. So it’s really cool, I think, to be able to have the flexibility to choose how frequently you want to check things done if you have or business or above plan. You can also choose from where we check pages.
[00:07:06.220]
So some websites will geo locate elements on page. So for example, if you come from the US, you’ll see prices in US dollars. If you go from the U.K., you’ll see them impounds. So here you can choose to visit the page, say, from the US, the EU or Asia. Let’s see, you’ve got different education channels. So whether you use email like Telegram, Xavier, as well as Web Herkes and also we recently, a few weeks back, integrated weird’s integrate the public connect as well as API.
[00:07:45.940]
So we cover a lot of integrations. Our plan is that you we want you to be able to slice and dice the data. So right now our integrations enable you to pass the alerts in the future. We would love to be able to provide even more data through the Web hooks, so then you can do really interesting stuff with that data.
[00:08:11.320]
Then we’ve got custom scheduling so you can set start dates and dates start time and time. So it’s really granular. You can really design these monitors to suit your needs. So that’s it. So you you click start monitoring and hexa. The watch will check this page periodically depending on your frequency and you get alerts as soon as we detect a change. Next up, let’s see each HTML element monitor. This is a really cool. So this is really good if you want to keep track of values on the page.
[00:08:52.570]
So say you have a some competitors or sell similar products you can set in HTML element monitor on the prices of their key products. And as soon as we detect a change in price, you receive an alert either by email like, you know, all the different integrations that we have. This is ideal for for tracking your own competitors or if, say, you’re an agency, you can use it to track your clients competitors and adjust your ads, adjust your products pricing according to how the market works.
[00:09:35.680]
You can also use this this model. I’m just going to show you how it works. Here you can also use this monitor to check on your suppliers, distributors, a common use case we have is if you have a set of suppliers that have limited stock on certain items, usually they provide a page where you can check sort of products and availability. If availability changes, you can be notified as soon as that happens. So you can then make changes in your on your website, put things out of stock or use our integrations as well.
[00:10:24.960]
So here, let me show you how the HTML Element Monitor works. So it’s essentially like having your own little Web browser and you can essentially pick elements that you want to check for, for changes you can use, say, our custom actions to perform things. So, for example, here we’re going to click Zagnut, right. Click on the pricing page. And I’m going to click actions, we’re going to click that. So this is going to go to your pricing page.
[00:11:01.110]
And with our visual monitor and e-mail element monitor, you have these custom actions so you can click on different parts of the page, browse here. Let’s have a look. So say, for example, you wanted to monitor a price. You select the price. You can refine the the selection. Say, for example, you’re not interested with the, you know, interested in checking the HTML. You can simply select the price here. And that will select the price as soon as a change is detected, you get a notification.
[00:11:42.990]
This is really ideal. If you’re not interested in getting notified when there are changes to save the design of the page or the banners, you just want to know about the price.
[00:11:55.540]
Let’s go to another type of monitor and let’s say the key word monitor now, key word monitor is ideal if you want to be notified whether a keyword appears on the page or disappears from a page. So it works in two ways. If you already have a keyword on the page, it will tell you if it’s no longer there, if a keyword isn’t on the page, then it will let you know if it does appear. So use cases for this is monitoring, say, industry websites for your brand term.
[00:12:32.260]
You can also use it to check pages for mentions of keywords like special of discount promotion, out of stock, things which could be used in a tactical way if you’re checking on a specific page.
[00:12:47.950]
Again, you have similar options that are all the monitors. You can choose how frequently you want to check page. You can again pick some. Oh yeah. There’s one cool thing about a carrier monitor. You can have a boolean logic. So you can say, I want to know if this keyword is here, but not that keyword. So I’ll just show you how that works. For example, let’s go on ABC this time we’re just going to run through a keyword one that’s.
[00:13:25.490]
So if, for example, I was checking the FEMA website and I wanted to be notified as soon as their Black Friday deal came up, then I could check for the term, you know, Black Friday. So here you can see I already have loads of Black Friday stuff. So let’s take in Black Friday.
[00:13:48.890]
And what we can say is notify me when there’s no more Black Friday and. That’s the. That’s right, uh, or. There’s no Black Friday and there’s no more Black Friday, so here we come out to two cases. So if Black Friday and Black Friday attached are no longer on the page, then I’ll get it. That means there’s no more Black Friday promotions and absolute.
[00:14:21.820]
Then your bank account would be it would be safe. Next up, let’s have a look at the technology monitor, not technology monitor is really useful for checking your your own website in case different technology is going missing.
[00:14:44.170]
So, for example, when you have a website, you probably have a Google Google Analytics tracking, could probably have a Facebook pixel.
[00:14:51.920]
You probably have a piece of script for your intercom or whatever chat app you use. Technology Monitor will check which Third-Party scripts you’re using and what kind of technology your website uses and let you know if there are any changes.
[00:15:12.970]
So here, let’s, for example, check out Cinéma. And let’s see what’s what they’re running. So this tool is useful if you’re an agency, for example, you can use this on your clients. If your client one day removes or deletes a tracking code that’s essential to a campaign, you’ll get notified instantly.
[00:15:46.400]
So here we can see that absolu are doing a B split testing, using visual Web site optimization. They’re running at engines. They’ve got Google Analytics, Google tech manager, Facebook pixel. What we can do is we can get notified whenever there’s any changes to these or if a specific technology changes.
[00:16:13.910]
So, for example, we might be only interested in knowing if analytics goes missing. So here we can type in Google Analytics and if Google Analytics goes missing from the stack, then you get a notification. So this is really good for clients. You’re on your own websites for peace of mind as well as if you’re prospecting, you can use this on your prospects websites as soon as they add a new service.
[00:16:44.870]
So, for example, they start using Entercom or they start using a different type of analytics tool. You can get in touch and it’s a great icebreaker. You can say, oh, hi, I noticed that you recently started using X, you may be interested in using Y instead. Or we see that your you recently started doing a B split testing. Know our agency has expertise doing this. How about we set up a meeting and we can discuss some ideas which might work well for your brand.
[00:17:22.220]
So this can be used as a icebreaker. It can be used in website teams to make sure that you’re not missing any tracking. And it can also be used to keep an eye on what your competitors are using. So say a competitor starts using some new service on their website. You’ll know straight away with this.
[00:17:47.890]
Let’s see, the e-mail monitor is is ideal if you’re interested in what’s happening behind the scenes on the Melkert. So if you’re in CEO and you build back links for your brand or your clients, you can use this, for example, to monitor your partners and check that they haven’t modified your back links, pointing back to your brand or back to your client. So you can basically say, you know, look for this snippet of HTML or if if this link is no longer there, then you’ll get a notification content monitoring.
[00:18:33.130]
It is ideal if you really want to focus just on text being changed, visible text so you don’t care about HTML changes behind the scenes. You don’t care about visual changes. You just want to know if content has to be modified. So this is ideal.
[00:18:53.200]
If you’re a a merchant and you maybe have affiliates promoting your brand of service, you can use this to monitor, for example, reviews or articles about your brand. And as soon as something changes, then you can be notified. You can also use this to say your say you’re interested in working with a specific brand where you can use the content monitor to monitor maybe their their news page or pages, which might have content you’re interested in, in tracking.
[00:19:33.440]
Let’s see the availability monitor works its basic uptime monitor. You can use it on a tactical level on your landing pages. So say you have 50 different landing pages. You can set up an availability monitor. As soon as it gets done, you get a notification. We’re planning on improving this so that it also supports API endpoints. So I think recipes I think this will be really useful if if you’re a developer and need that kind of tracking. Next up, we have the domain who is monitor.
[00:20:16.680]
Now, this is an interesting one. We recently added, um, let’s see. Let’s check up Semur again.
[00:20:26.570]
This is you can do lots of different things with this. You can use it if you’re interested in snatching domain that’s about to expire. You can set a who is a monitor on it. And as soon as it goes onto the open market and it’s available to buy it, then you’ll get a notification. You can also use it to get a heads up if your domain name is about to expire, just so that you don’t forget to renew it. And you can also use it for your clients.
[00:21:01.630]
So if you handle a website, development and domains for your clients, this can provide a little bit of peace of mind in terms of you’ll know that you’re not going to miss a renewal for a client because they might be the person responsible for it, but they might be busy and not see that the domain is about to expire. You can really provide some superior service with this by being able to say, oh, we just notified of your domain is about to expire in seven days.
[00:21:34.730]
We recommend, you know, renew it. So this is really cool. So for agencies, for your for e-commerce stores to make sure you don’t lose your your domains.
[00:21:47.750]
And also if you are interested in a domain that’s not available but might expire, this is great to be able to snatch it. And it’s included in our in our suites of monitors. Next up, let’s see the last one of our automatic A.I. monitor. So this is ideal. If you don’t want to mess about with the settings, it will look for any types of changes across the visual content, e-mail and technology monitors. So you can just set it on the page.
[00:22:25.980]
The configuration is pretty minimal.
[00:22:31.510]
And as you can see, and it will and intelligently let you know when something changes that you should be aware of. So I personally prefer to go really granular and have specific types of monitors for specific use cases. But this is also super useful if either you don’t know where to start or you just want to monitor lots of different sites and this covers all your bases. So this is really good for for for peace of mind. But you might get loads of different alerts because it will it will track for loads of different types of changes.
[00:23:12.370]
Right. So I’ve covered the different monitors we have. I’m just going to show you how it looks like when you get an alert, see, so you get an idea of how it can help. So let’s see. I’m just going to go on a monitor that I set up earlier. And so today is Black Friday, probably doing loads of shopping today. Hence, the watch can help you grab some awesome deals. So what I’ve done is I set up a monitor on, say, Best Buy’s website, on their homepage to have a section called Black Friday Deals.
[00:23:54.550]
Whenever a change is detected on our visual motel, you get to see this nifty before and after view. And I detect the changes on the on the page. Now we’re working on improving the change, the change highlighting. So right now, we get this red overlay, but we’re going to make it so that it’s even more visible so you can see changes. But here you can see what what change before and after. If you’re a price change or if a product change, it’s really easy to to see this and all the changes get archived for up to three months.
[00:24:37.330]
And I’m just going to show you how it looks when you have. Different changes, so here, let’s have a look at this. Right, so here you get the audio, snapshots, all the changes I hear it tells you when the change was detected, the percentage of the change, if you find that you get false negatives, is sometimes a page might have a very small visual change. You can change the sensitivity so you can make it, say, 10 percent, 20 percent, etc.
[00:25:10.620]
. Let’s have a look at a example of a HTML element. Monitor that, for example. See? So HTML Element Monitor is ideal for price monitoring. You can also use it to monitor feels on a page. Essentially you turn any page into your own data source. So here, let’s have a look at this one. Let’s see. Right. So here a price went from ninety nine dollars to seventy nine. We see this on our e-mail monitor.
[00:26:01.300]
This is ideal if you want to get a heads up, if a product page changes, you can set these up on all your competitors product pages that you’re interested in. We’re working on ways to book, add multiple URLs. So at the moment you’re doing this on a page by page basis. But our road map has some nifty new features which will enable you to add a list of URLs and set a monitor. So it would be really easy and quick to monitor multiple things.
[00:26:35.380]
Let’s see. We covered quite a bit so far. Let’s have a look at maybe a technology monitor and see how that looks in terms of. Changes, let’s have a look at radar. So I did radar a few days back and. They somehow managed to delete the Facebook pixel, so Hengshui was deleted that they then fixed it a few hours later. But, you know, if you’re an e-commerce store and you’re using Google analytics, you’re using Facebook, Facebook pixel, you know, losing your tracking means you’re not going to get visibility for yourself.
[00:27:30.360]
You know what? The traffic that you’re buying is effective. So this is really good for e-commerce stores, for agencies doing PPC marketing or buying traffic. Let’s see. So whenever you get changes, you get to see them on your events feeds. We also calculate a rough idea of the productive time you’ve saved.
[00:27:59.360]
So we I think we calculate roughly like I think 40 seconds or 50 seconds per for a check, which if you think about the loss of productive time, is probably way more.
[00:28:14.900]
But this is just a rough indication. We find that, you know, before we would have like team members, you know, check pages. You know, occasionally the problem with competitor checking is that it usually happens on an ad hoc basis, usually too busy to do it. And when you do, you’re kind of wasting time with this. You can set it once and it’s it runs on autopilot and lets you know if something really needs your attention or not.
[00:28:44.870]
So here you can find all your alerts. If you go on your monitors, your rails, you get to see all the alerts, all the monitors that you have set up. You can organize them by tag. So, for example, if you have different clients, you can take them by client name, which makes it easy to show just the ones that you’re interested in. Let’s see, what else have I got? covid. Yeah, I mean, we’re all nopsema so you guys love roadmaps, right?
[00:29:18.010]
So what’s what’s next? So here’s a quick look at our road map, which is linked on the ABC model page.
[00:29:30.070]
So in the last few months, we’ve we’ve added loads of new features, some new monitors, such as the Who is monitor. And this is just the beginning. So next up in our short time road map, we are going to be adding some bulk monitoring features so you can add multiple pages to monitor much, much more quickly. We’re going to be adding a site monitor. So this is really useful if you want to be notified, if a website has a new page or if it’s to say, for example, we have a competitor, they sell different widgets.
[00:30:17.080]
If you have a site monitor, as soon as they had a product page or as soon as they had a blog post, you could be notified whenever that happens. So right now, you can kind of do this by setting up an HTML monitor on their site map, but this will make it even easier. Next up, I think we’re going to be doing a back link monitors right now. You can do this with our e-mail monitor as well, but we’re going to make it even easier.
[00:30:43.480]
So if you’re an agency and you’re building links for your clients, it’s going to be super easy to put all your Dantley, your partners on this. And whenever they make changes, so, for example, they change your linked nofollow or they remove your back link, then you’ll be notified as soon as that happens. So you can get in touch and say, oh, you know, I noticed you made a few changes to your article the night.
[00:31:08.390]
What’s up? We’re looking at improving our.
[00:31:16.880]
Spreadsheet and Google sheets exports. So this is going to be really useful for the HTML Element Monitor. So if you’re monitoring prices on the page, you’ll get a nice spreadsheet with all the different price changes. I think that’s going to be a game changer. So these are some of the things that we’re working on at the moment. We recently did a big UI update and this is just the beginning. So, yeah, I think I’ve covered most of the things that I wanted to run through.
[00:31:48.050]
I think we can if you guys have any questions or use case or need ideas for use cases, I’d be happy to help.
[00:31:57.290] – Lindsay(AppSumo)
Yeah. Thank you so much for walking us through that. And we’ll you have some more questions. You can go ahead and put those in the Q&A box now. I covered the road maps. You got that. And I you’ve mentioned that this would probably come up. Joe, as they say they’re curious, is their future plans on the road map to include social media pages? We talked about this before we went live. Go ahead and let them know about that.
[00:32:23.220] – Chris(Hexowatch)
Right.
[00:32:24.260]
So, yeah, I mean, as we mentioned on the on the similar page, Hexa, which is not designed to monitor social media platforms, two reasons. The first is the terms of service usually doesn’t allow that.
[00:32:48.230]
So we’re focusing on creating a sustainable, sustainable business. We’re not interested in having to play a game of whack a mole with the way the big networks.
[00:33:00.380]
The second reason is these sites usually have loads of countermeasures. Whilst it might work, we can’t guarantee that it will all the time work. So you likely get false negatives, false positives. Sorry. So this is why we’re focusing on the use case of using Hexa watch on your own websites, your competitors industry websites does does a lot of potential in in these types of websites.
[00:33:36.350] – Lindsay(AppSumo)
Wonderful. Thank you. The next question we have here from Jonathan, is there a limit to the number of websites that can be monitored as part of each plan?
[00:33:46.310]
And then there’s great question.
[00:33:48.020] – Chris(Hexowatch)
Yeah, great question. No, no limits. So you’re only limited by the amount of checks in your plan. So if you’re on the plan, you get four or five thousand five hundred checks.
[00:34:04.280]
So if you were to check a page on a monthly basis, that’s potentially four thousand five hundred domains. If you’re checking, say, on a on a daily basis, I’m not a math genius, but we’ve put the calculation on our Absi page. So it shows the breakdown. But but yeah, no, no domain limits.
[00:34:32.900]
You can use as many as you want.
[00:34:35.000]
You only have a checks limit per month.
[00:34:39.570] – Lindsay(AppSumo)
Awesome, thank you. The next question, can we set up a PDF report for all monitors based on URL? A great question and great suggestion, I will add it to our ideas list. It is not something that I think we do.
[00:35:00.680] – Chris(Hexowatch)
We do have a we have a export for Alert’s to see as and to Google sheets, but we don’t have it in in PDF. So, yeah. Well, we’ll add this to our ideas list. Thank you for this cool suggestion.
[00:35:19.910] – Lindsay(AppSumo)
Thank you. All right. Those are all of the questions that we have here today. So I’m going to go ahead and wrap us up Sumolings if you have not already. You can go ahead and redeem your codes for Hexowatch over at AppSumo. Well, right now it is starting at ninety eight dollars for a lifetime deal and of course, is backed by a 60 day guarantee. So you can go ahead, get set up, play around with it, see how it works for you.
[00:35:43.130]
And once you’ve done that, we do love to hear how it’s going. You can go ahead and leave your reviews on the deal page. Right now, Hexa Watch has a five star rating and 14 reviews. We love to hear what you think. So leave them there. And of course, if you have any more questions, you can leave those on the page as well. Thank you so much, Chris, for walking us through and and telling us all about this.
[00:36:05.180] – Lindsay(AppSumo)
Thank you.
[00:36:05.780] – Chris(Hexowatch)
Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. Enjoy your Black Friday and to speak to you guys soon.
[00:36:11.640] – Lindsay(AppSumo)
But have a good one. Too.
