Website monitoring for marketing teams

You own the company site, the campaign landing pages and the campaign domains, and IT, a vendor or an agency runs the hosting and DNS behind them. OctoPing tells you when one of them breaks and gives you the failure reason and the locations that saw it, and the site's page records when it started, so your message to whoever fixes it carries evidence.

Pages on hosting that IT or a vendor runs

A release from IT turns a landing page into a 503. A certificate on a campaign domain expires because the person who bought it changed teams. A renewal reminder goes to an address no one checks anymore. You hear about it from a colleague or a customer, and then you ask IT what happened with nothing more to say than that the page is down.

In 2017 The Register reported that Marketo let the registration for marketo.com expire. Tracking links, images and forms in millions of its customers' marketing emails stopped working, along with Marketo's website and apps. Service returned after the nameservers were switched back. Its CEO, Steve Lucas, said the company had found process errors with auto renewals as well as human errors. If your forms and emails depend on a vendor's domain, add a page on it as a site and you get a domain expiry warning for it, though only the vendor can renew it.

Evidence for IT or the vendor

The down alert names the cause, which is Timeout, DNS resolution failed, TLS/SSL error, Connection failed or the HTTP status, and lists what each location saw. The site's page lists its outages with the start time, duration and failure reason, and the recovery alert gives the downtime and the cause. Forward the alert to IT, and add the start time from the outage list.

Checked from
------------
  Primary: Down (HTTP 403) - 0 minutes ago
  US: Up (HTTP 200) - 0 minutes ago
  Europe: Down (HTTP 503) - 0 minutes ago
  Asia: Up (HTTP 200) - 0 minutes ago

An alert like that one suggests a regional network, CDN or DNS problem. See the guide to telling a regional outage from a real outage and the docs on failure reasons.

Multi-region confirmation

Alerts come from the primary checker, and probes in the US, Europe and Asia confirm or contradict what it sees. A failure that a probe region also sees is confirmed, and the alert names the regions that can't reach the site. When every region reaches the site and only the primary checker is refused, you get one notice and no down alert, and the site reads Partial. The notice lists the addresses to allow when they're known. The probes report about every 5 minutes, and a down alert can wait up to 10 minutes for them. See multi-region monitoring.

Uptime and the degraded state

Set a response-time threshold in milliseconds on a landing page. While the page answers but the latest response is slower than the threshold, it reads Degraded and OctoPing sends a slow-response alert. The threshold is off until you set it. To get that alert, add an email, Discord, webhook or browser push rule, because Slack doesn't carry it. See uptime monitoring.

SSL and domain expiry on campaign domains

SSL and domain monitoring are on for a new site. The domain check reads the public registration record, so you can watch a campaign domain that IT or a vendor registered and you hold no login for. Warnings start 30 days before a certificate expires and 30 days before a domain does. Send them to yourself and to the person who holds the renewal. Some registries don't publish an expiry date, and OctoPing can only warn about what the registry makes public. If a campaign domain isn't one of your sites yet, add an address on it that serves a page or redirects to one. There's no domain-only mode, so it counts as a site and gets the uptime check too. See SSL certificate monitoring and domain expiry monitoring.

robots.txt after a release

A release you don't control can replace robots.txt with a copy that blocks crawlers. With the robots.txt check on, which starts switched off, OctoPing fetches the file every 6 hours and alerts with the changed lines, and it flags the site as blocked when it finds a rule that bars all crawlers from the whole site. See robots.txt monitoring.

The content check on pages others edit

A colleague corrects the support hours, a vendor rewrites the terms on an offer page or text you didn't write appears in the body copy, and the page still returns a 200. Turn on the content check for that page, and it checks every 30 minutes by default and reports the lines that changed. It reads the main body text and may skip navigation, buttons, footers and, on some page builders, headlines and prices, so test it on your page before you rely on it. See website change detection.

Alerts in Slack

An Admin or Owner connects Slack to the workspace once and invites the OctoPing app to a channel, and you pick that channel on each site's Notifications page. Slack carries down and recovery alerts, certificate and domain expiry warnings, and content, DNS, robots.txt and hosting change alerts. See the guide to SSL expiry alerts in Slack and the docs on Slack alerts.

A status page for stakeholders

If sales, support or leadership keep asking whether the site is down, publish a status page with the sites they care about. It shows each site's status and 90 days of history, the incidents you post and scheduled maintenance. Anyone with the address can read a published page, so choose the sites you're comfortable sharing. See status pages.

Plans for in-house teams

A site is one URL, so each landing page and each campaign domain counts as a site. Your plan sets how many sites and seats the workspace has:

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, and read-only viewers are free. 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.