Website monitoring for marketing agencies

You run campaign landing pages, microsites and marketing sites for clients, and you want to hear about a broken page, an expiring domain or a moved host before the client does. OctoPing watches those sites and domains from one workspace, tells you what failed and where, and gives each client a status page and a monthly summary so they can see you're on it. For the rest of an agency's book of client sites, read website monitoring for agencies.

How campaign pages fail

A deploy turns a campaign landing page into a 500. A client's developer ships a release and the staging robots.txt goes live with it. A campaign domain lapses once the campaign ends. A site moves to a new host, or the client changes email provider and their mail goes to a different server. In our experience agencies often hold neither the registrar login nor the hosting, so nothing reaches you and the client hears from a customer first.

Uptime and failure reasons on landing pages

OctoPing requests the page, follows redirects and counts a status from 200 to 399 as up. Checks run every 5 minutes by default. Each failure is classified, so the alert says Timeout, DNS resolution failed, TLS/SSL error or the HTTP status instead of a bare error, and it lists what the primary checker and the US, Europe and Asia probes each saw. A landing page that redirects to the homepage reads as up, because checks follow redirects, and the content check, if it's on, can show the different text. See uptime monitoring and multi-region confirmation.

Domain and SSL expiry on campaign domains

OctoPing reads a domain's public registration record, so you can watch a client's or a campaign's domain without a registrar login. New sites have domain and SSL monitoring on, and the warnings start 30 days before a domain expires and 30 days before a certificate does. They go to the people you list, such as the account manager and whoever holds the renewal.

A domain registered for one campaign can outlive it while something printed or linked still points there, as a Heinz campaign domain did. When a registry publishes an expiry date, a domain on your list gets a warning, and that's the moment to check whether anything printed or linked still points at it. Some registries don't publish one, and OctoPing can only warn about what the registry makes public. See client domain expiry alerts.

Hosting, DNS and MX changes

A host move or a new email provider can leave the website loading normally, so uptime stays green. Hosting change detection alerts when the network behind a site's address, or a CDN in front of it, changes. DNS monitoring compares nameserver and MX records, and a changed MX record sends the client's email to a different server, so replies can stop arriving. Both checks start switched off, so turn them on for the domains where a move would matter. See hosting change detection, DNS monitoring and the guide to detecting a host migration.

robots.txt after a client's developer ships

The staging site's robots.txt blocks every crawler, and when a release copies it to production the page still loads while search engines read the block. OctoPing fetches the file every 6 hours, sends the changed lines when it differs and flags the site as blocked on Disallow: / under User-agent: *. The check starts switched off. See robots.txt monitoring and the guide to catching a robots.txt block. If search traffic is the main thing you answer for, read SEO monitoring for agencies.

The content check on key pages

A freelancer rewrites the terms on an offer page, and the page still returns a 200. On a client's offer page, the content check reads the main text and sends you the changed lines. Switch it on per site, and it runs every 30 minutes by default. Client pages built from layout blocks can lose their headlines, prices, buttons and footers in that reading, so edit a line on each client page you care about and see whether the next check reports it. See website change detection.

Status pages, contacts and the rest

• Status page. Give each client a white-label page with the sites you choose. See status pages.
• Contacts. Add the client's email to that page and they get alerts for its sites, including outages and recoveries, expiry warnings and change alerts, plus a monthly summary. They take no seat, and they hear about every site on the page, so keep each client's sites on that client's page. See the guide to adding a client as a contact.
• Groups. Create a group for each client to keep the sites list organized. Groups don't hide a site from anyone in the workspace.
• Maintenance windows. Schedule one for a launch or a cutover. It holds back down alerts, and DNS, hosting and expiry alerts still send. See maintenance windows.

Seats, plans and how a client workspace is organized are on website monitoring for agencies.

One price per site

Each site gets all the checks, and no plan limits which of them a site can use. A site is one URL, so a landing page on its own path counts as one site.

Who builds OctoPing

OctoPing is built by Axiolo, which uses it to watch its clients' marketing websites and landing pages. The checks, the client status pages and the monthly summaries are the ones Axiolo relies on for that work.

How it fits the price

Every plan includes all the checks and as many status pages as you need, with client contacts and maintenance windows. Plans start at $19 a month for 20 sites. See pricing for the full list.

Every account starts with a 14-day free trial. No card required. Start your 14-day trial and add a client's site to see it working.