Monitor ad landing pages for downtime

You pay for every click, so you want to hear when a landing page starts returning errors, timing out or failing to load, and you want the person who can pause the campaign to see it. OctoPing checks the page, classifies the failure and sends the alert to Slack, email or your own tools. It doesn't connect to your ad platforms, so pausing a campaign or switching an ad's final URL is a step your team takes when the alert arrives.

How landing pages fail during a campaign

A deploy removes the URL and the page returns a 404. A firewall rule starts refusing visitors with a 403. A launch sends a burst of traffic and the server answers with 500s or timeouts. The ads keep running while each click lands on an error page.

Google Ads checks the destination too. Its Destination not working policy says that destinations returning an HTTP error code to Google's AdsBot web crawlers lead to disapproval, and it gives 403 Forbidden, 404 Not Found and 500 Internal Server Error as examples. OctoPing isn't Google's crawler, so a rule that refuses only AdsBot is outside what it can see. It does catch the errors, timeouts and certificate problems that a visitor requesting the page would get.

Check intervals and plan limits

A site is checked every 5 minutes by default, and you can choose 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 30 minutes or 1 hour. The fastest interval depends on the plan:

Put checks every 30 seconds on the landing pages with the most spend behind them. Three things decide how soon you hear. The interval sets how soon the primary checker sees a failure. The alert rule's retry threshold sets how many failed checks in a row come before the first down alert, which is 3 unless you change it, from 1 to 10. A lower threshold alerts sooner, and a higher one waits out a single failed check. The third is the regional probes, which report about every 5 minutes and confirm a failure before the alert goes out, so a down alert can wait up to 10 minutes for them. On the fastest intervals the probe report usually sets the time of the alert. See uptime monitoring.

Failure reasons that matter on a landing page

A check passes on an HTTP status from 200 to 399. Anything else fails and is classified, and the alert names the cause:

The docs list every code on the failure reasons page. Checks follow redirects, so a landing page that redirects elsewhere reads as up, and the content check below, if it's on, can show the different text.

Checks from the US, Europe and Asia

Probes in the US, Europe and Asia report on the same page, and a failure at the primary checker starts the alert, which the probes confirm. Once a failure is confirmed, the down alert lists what each location saw, and when some regions still reach the page it names the ones that don't. A region that fails while the primary checker still reaches the page sends no alert, and its result shows on the site's page. See multi-region monitoring.

SSL on landing pages

SSL monitoring is on for a new site, and the warning starts 30 days before the certificate expires. An expired certificate shows visitors a browser warning, and the check fails with a TLS/SSL error that the down alert names. See SSL certificate monitoring.

The content check on landing pages

If a colleague or an agency edits the body copy of a landing page, the content check, if it's on, compares the page's main text with the last snapshot and sends the changed lines. It starts switched off and runs every 30 minutes by default. It can leave out navigation, buttons and footers, and on some page builders headlines and prices too, so a page built from layout blocks may not report an edit to its offer line. Change a line you care about and see whether the next check reports it before you rely on it. See website change detection.

Alerts to Slack

An Admin or Owner connects Slack to the workspace once and invites the OctoPing app to the channel your media team watches. You then pick that channel on each landing page's Notifications page. The message gives the site, the problem, the response time and which locations see the failure, with a button that opens the site in OctoPing. Slack doesn't carry the slow-response alert, so give a slow page a second rule that sends by email or Discord. The guide to SSL expiry alerts in Slack covers the Slack setup.

What the team does with the alert

1. 1. Read the cause and the locations

   The alert says why the page failed and which locations saw it.

2. 2. Pause the spend or switch the URL

   The person who owns the campaign pauses it, or points the ad's final URL at a working page, in the ad platform.

3. 3. Send the evidence to the page owner

   Forward the alert to the developer, IT or the agency that runs the page.

4. 4. Resume after the recovery alert

   It gives the downtime and the cause, so you know how long the campaign ran into a broken page.

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

A site is one URL, so each landing page counts as a site. Every plan includes all the checks, so the pages you watch for downtime also get SSL, domain, DNS, hosting, robots.txt and content checks. 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.