Put a competitor under monitoring

Vector can check a competitor’s sources on a schedule and tell you when something changes, so you don’t have to remember to look. You choose what to watch, turn monitoring on, and set how often it checks.

​

Choose what to watch

Monitoring watches sources — a pricing page, a changelog, a blog — not a competitor as a whole. Pick them in the competitor’s dossier, on the Resources tab: switch on Monitoring for each resource worth watching. Most resources need their real URL before they can be checked. Social accounts, app stores and review sites can’t be watched; they stay links in Resources.

​

Turn monitoring on

Open Monitoring from the Track group in the left menu and go to the Competitors tab. Each row is a competitor: what’s watched in their dossier, how often they’re checked, an On checkbox, when they were last checked, and Check now. Tick On. Vector checks the competitor’s watched sources straight away to capture a baseline: a record of what’s there today, which never raises an alert. From then on, everything it reports is new since the previous check. The table shows your short list. Tick include long list to bring in the wider field — useful when someone from the long list starts moving. You can also turn monitoring on from the 🔔 Monitoring tab of a dossier. There, the switch starts watching all of the competitor’s sources at once, and you uncheck the ones you don’t need.

​

Choose how often to check

Pick a schedule in the Frequency column. Weekly is the default.

• Daily, Weekly or Every 2 weeks
• Monthly — then pick the day of the month: the 1st, 5th, 10th or 15th
• Every 2 months, Every 3 months, Every 6 months or Yearly
• Never (off) — stops checking and turns monitoring off for that competitor

The Check setting on a dossier’s 🔔 Monitoring tab offers Daily, Weekly, Every 2 weeks and Monthly. Every check costs a fetch, so the schedule is also a cost decision: daily for the competitor you’re directly up against, monthly for one you keep on the record.

​

Check a competitor right now

Click Check now on a competitor’s row to check their sources without waiting for the schedule — right after you turn monitoring on, or before a decision that needs a fresh read. The check runs in the background.

​

Find out what monitoring found

Changes land in your Inbox and in the competitor’s dossier. A pricing change is also saved to the dossier’s Pricing tab, so a price history builds up on its own. Every check, scheduled or manual, shows up in the Check log, and what it found appears in Recent changes and the Summary counts. The Last column on the Competitors tab shows when each competitor was last checked, so you can tell at a glance that monitoring is running. See Read check results.

​

Where to go next