Optimizing Alerts with Conditions

Take control of your notifications with conditions—powerful filters that ensure you receive alerts only when changes meet your specific criteria. This eliminates notification noise and helps you focus on what truly matters.

How Conditions Work

Distill uses a two-step process to determine when to send alerts:

1. Change detection - The monitor identifies a change on the webpage
2. Condition evaluation - The detected change is tested against your defined criteria (both global and local conditions)

Alerts are sent only when both steps succeed, ensuring every notification is relevant and actionable.

Examples

Price Alerts

Monitor product prices and get notified only when they reach your target:

• Without Conditions: You’ll receive alerts for every price change, even minor fluctuations
• With Conditions: Alert only when the price drops below your threshold—for example, notify when an $80 item falls below $70 using: Added Text is less than 70

Keyword Monitoring

Track specific terms or phrases appearing on monitored pages:

• Scenario: You want alerts only when certain keywords appear in new content
• Solution: Create conditions targeting specific keywords. For a single keyword, use: Added Text contains yourkeyword. For multiple keywords, combine conditions with OR: Added Text contains keyword1 OR Added Text contains keyword2

This approach is ideal for job postings, news monitoring, or tracking competitor mentions.

Global and Local Conditions

Distill offers two types of conditions to give you flexible control over your alerts:

Global conditions apply universally across every monitor in your watchlist—perfect for setting baseline rules that affect all your monitors at once.

To access global conditions:

1. Click the hamburger icon in your Watchlist
2. Select Global Conditions

Local conditions apply to individual monitors, allowing you to set specific rules for each page you’re tracking.

When both global and local conditions exist, alerts trigger only when the change satisfies all conditions from both levels. This AND logic ensures maximum precision in your notifications.

Add or delete conditions

Managing conditions for individual monitors is straightforward:

1. Click the menu button on any monitor in your watchlist

2. Select Edit Options from the menu
3. Click Add Condition to create a new filtering rule, or click the cross icon next to existing conditions to remove them

4. Save your changes to activate the new condition settings

Your conditions take effect immediately and will be evaluated against all future changes detected on that monitor.

Text Types

Understanding text types is crucial for creating effective conditions. Distill offers different text types that let you apply conditions to specific portions of the monitored content.

Example - Changes in the monitored content

Let’s examine how text types work with a practical example:

• Original Text: “Distill is an awesome monitoring app for web”
• Updated Text: “Distill is the best web monitoring app”

In the change history, additions appear highlighted in green by default. Deleted content isn’t shown unless you enable the “Deleted” option.

The table below demonstrates how different text types capture this change. Notice how the word ‘web’ moving to a different position affects Added Text versus Net Added Text.

Tip: Click the bell icon in the change history to view the actual values for each text type and see how your conditions were evaluated when the alert triggered. This debugging tool helps you fine-tune your conditions for optimal results.

Condition Types

Distill provides a comprehensive set of condition types to match virtually any monitoring scenario. Combine multiple conditions using AND/OR logic to create sophisticated alert rules tailored to your specific needs.

Build complex filtering logic by combining multiple conditions using AND or OR operators:

• AND - All conditions must be true for the alert to trigger (stricter filtering)
• OR - At least one condition must be true for the alert to trigger (broader filtering)

Important Notes:

1. Case sensitivity - Conditions are case-insensitive by default, matching both “Product” and “product”. For case-sensitive matching, use the regular expression condition type.
2. Numeric conditions - Work best when your selection contains a single number. With multiple numbers present, the condition evaluates each number independently and triggers if any match occurs.

Number Format For Numeric Conditions

Accurate numeric comparisons require proper number formatting. Distill defaults to the United States format (e.g., 1,000.00 for one thousand).

If you’re monitoring websites using different regional formats, such as European notation (e.g., 1.000,00), select the appropriate format in the Conditions settings. This ensures decimal points and thousand separators are interpreted correctly for precise price tracking and numeric alerts.

Testing Conditions

Before deploying conditions to live monitors, validate their logic using Distill’s built-in testing tools. Test against historical data from your change history or custom sample data to ensure your conditions work as expected across different scenarios.

Access the Test Condition feature from:

• The Conditions section on any monitor’s Options Page

• The Condition Debugger window in your change history

How testing works:

The screenshot below demonstrates the Test Conditions window with custom data. In this example, a regular expression condition is being tested against sample text. The False final result indicates this condition wouldn’t trigger an alert with the given input—helping you refine your conditions before they affect real monitoring.

Notification Status and Condition Debugger

Distill’s Change History records every detected change, providing a complete audit trail regardless of whether conditions were met.

When a change meets your condition criteria:

• Configured alerts are sent (email, SMS, push notification, etc.)
• The monitor’s status changes to “unread” in your watchlist
• A bell icon appears in the change history entry

Understanding the Condition Debugger:

Click any bell icon to open the Condition Debugger, which reveals exactly how your conditions were evaluated. A True final result means all conditions passed and alerts were sent; False means conditions weren’t met and no alerts went out.

Example of a triggered alert’s condition evaluation:

Debugging non-triggered changes:

When a change doesn’t meet your conditions, the bell icon appears in an inactive state. Click it anyway to review the evaluation details and understand why the alert didn’t fire—this insight is invaluable for troubleshooting and refining your conditions.

Common Use-Cases for Text Alerts

Learn from these practical examples to build effective conditions for your monitoring needs:

Alert on text additions only

Ignore deletions and focus only on new content:

• Added text is not Empty

Ignore minor changes

Filter out insignificant updates by requiring a minimum character count:

• Added Text length is greater than 10

This prevents alerts for trivial changes like single character typos or minor punctuation updates.

Alert on price increases only

Track when prices go up to monitor inflation or repricing:

• Added Text has number that increased more than 0

Case-sensitive keyword matching

Match exact capitalization when it matters (e.g., brand names, acronyms):

• Added text matches regular expression your-keyword with gm flag

Alert on alphabetic changes only

Ignore price and date changes, focusing only on text content updates:

• Added text matches regular expression [a-zA-Z]{1,} with gim flag

This regular expression matches one or more alphabetic characters, perfect for monitoring text-only changes.

Numeric change alerts

Monitor only numerical updates (prices, stock counts, statistics):

• Added text matches regular expression [0-9]{1,}

This pattern matches one or more numeric characters, filtering out text-only changes.

Monitor multiple keywords

Alert when any of several keywords appear in new content:

• Added Text matches regular expression keyword1|keyword2|keyword3|keyword4 with gim flag

The pipe (|) acts as an OR operator in regular expressions. Alternatively, create separate conditions with the contains type and connect them with OR for easier management.

Alert only for truly new content

Prevent duplicate alerts when content flip-flops or temporarily changes:

• Text doesn't match any previous text

Use case: Job listing sites often add and remove the same positions. This condition ensures you’re only alerted about genuinely new postings, not recurring ones.

Example configuration:

In the example below, no alert triggers because the current content matches a previous version in the change history:

Ignore text reordering and focus on actual content changes

Perfect for dynamic pages that frequently rearrange content without adding or removing information:

• Net Added is not empty - Alerts only for genuinely new content. Example: “ABC” → “BDC” triggers an alert for “D” only, ignoring the repositioning of “B” and “C”. “ABC” → “CAB” triggers no alert since only order changed.

• Net Deleted is not empty - Alerts only for removed content. Example: “ABC” → “BDC” triggers an alert for deleted “A” only, ignoring repositioned letters and new additions.

• Combine both conditions (with OR) to catch all net changes while ignoring reordering: Alerts for both “D” added and “A” deleted, but ignores “B” and “C” moving positions.

Ideal for: News feeds, product catalogs, search results, and any content that reorders frequently.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

When alerts don’t behave as expected, use this systematic approach to diagnose and fix condition problems:

1. Review Change History - Examine your monitor’s change history to see exactly what changes Distill detected. This helps you understand whether the issue is with change detection or condition evaluation.

2. Analyze Condition Evaluation - Click the bell icon in the change history to see how your conditions were evaluated. This debugger shows you step-by-step which conditions passed or failed, revealing exactly why alerts were or weren’t sent.

3. Refine Your Conditions - Based on your analysis, adjust conditions for better accuracy. Common fixes include:

   • Narrowing your selection to isolate specific content
   • Switching text types (e.g., from “Text” to “Added Text”)
   • Adjusting thresholds for numeric conditions
   • Simplifying complex regex patterns