Reduce False-Positives When Monitoring Website Changes
False-positives are changes that you don’t care about. Fluxguard offers multiple techniques to eliminate or reduce these legitimate but irrelevant changes. Let’s dig in.
Remove Footers, Navigation, Modals, Etc From Monitored Pages
1. Edit Exclusion Filters
- Exclusion Filters remove areas of monitored pages.
- Add simple DOM selectors and Fluxguard will remove navigation, footers, etc from every monitored page. You can use Fluxguard’s Visual Selector to find appropriate selectors for areas of a page to filter.
- Add Exclusion Filters at the session or account level. When you add them at the session level, they apply to all pages in that session. Add them at the account level, and they will apply to every page in your site.
- Learn how to set up filters.
2. Add Commonsense Defaults
Consider adding the following to remove areas of pages that commonly introduce false-positives. This includes easily identifiable headers, footers, navigation, and modals. Customize to suit your needs.
#footer
#header
#sidebar
.footer
.header
.sidebar
aside
footer
header
iframe
nav
div[class*="cookie"]
div[class*="modal"]
div[class*="footer"]
div[class*="overlay"]
div[id*="cookie"]
div[id*="modal"]
div[id*="footer"]
div[id*="overlay"]
Remember, when you add filters, these areas will be completely removed from the monitored page, so it may look different than when you visit the page in a browser.
Block Ad Networks and Marketing Trackers That Pollute Web Changes
1. Edit Network Blocks
- Network Blocks work similar to ad blockers in your browser: they prevent certain third-party scripts and other resources from loading. This can reduce false-positives by eliminating scripts that pollute pages with modals, advertisements, chatbots, etc.
- Add domains in Network Blocks to completely prevent loading of scripts from certain sites on monitored pages.
- Add Network Blocks at the session or account level. When you add them at the session level, they apply to all pages in that session. Add them at the account level, and they will apply to every page in your site.
- Learn how to set up blocks.
2. Add Commonsense Defaults
Go to Session Settings > Filters and opt to turn on “Enable Prepackaged Block List 1” (it may already be on). This will block multiple ads, marketing trackers, and other DOM-polluting third-party cruft.
If this option interferes with your monitoring (for example, you may actually want to monitor the results of some of these items), you can turn this option off and customize this list. At the moment, Block List 1 consists of:
adobedtm.com
adsrvr.org
cookie-script.com
cookielaw.org
doubleclick.net
evidon.com
facebook.com
facebook.net
foresee.com
hotjar.com
hubspot.com
instagram.com
intercom.io
intercomcdn
linkedin.com
marketo.com
moatads.com
onetrust.com
optimizely.com
pinterest.com
sharethis.com
tiktok.com
translate-pa.googleapis.com
translate.googleapis.com
Turn on Adblock
1. Go to Session Settings
2. Select the Filters tab
3. Make sure Adblock is enabled
This will help reduce some DOM changes from marketing pollution. This works particularly well with visual change monitoring, but it can also help with other change detection strategies.