You want to hear that a landing page has broken before the campaign spends another day sending visitors to it, and you want the person who can pause the campaign to hear it first. For the team side, see monitoring for paid media teams and monitoring for marketing teams.
What takes a landing page away from visitors
| What visitors get | What shows it |
|---|---|
| A page that fails to load or returns an error | The uptime check fails, and the down alert names the cause: Timeout, DNS resolution failed, or an HTTP status such as 404 or 503. |
| A page that answers slowly | A response-time threshold you set marks the site Degraded and sends a slow-response alert. The time runs until the first response headers arrive. |
| A browser warning about the certificate | The SSL check starts warning 30 days before expiry by default, and an expired certificate fails the uptime check with a TLS/SSL error. |
| A campaign domain close to lapsing | The domain check starts warning 30 days before the registration ends by default, when the registry publishes a date. |
Enter the URL a campaign sends people to
A site in OctoPing is one URL. Enter the full address a click opens, with https:// and the path. A campaign page and the homepage are two sites, and so are the www and bare versions of a domain, so add each address your ads, emails, social posts and printed links use. The check follows redirects and judges the page they end on, so a final URL that redirects to a working page reads as up, even when visitors land somewhere you didn't intend.
Checks to turn on for a landing page
| Check | New site starts | Keep it on when |
|---|---|---|
| SSL certificate | On, every day | The page uses https. |
| Domain registration | On, every week | The page sits on a domain bought for the campaign. |
| Content | Off, every 30 minutes once on | Others can edit the body copy. |
| DNS | Off | Someone else controls the nameservers or the mail routing. |
| Hosting | Off | The page could move host or sit behind a CDN. |
Choose an interval within your plan
Uptime checks run every 5 minutes by default and the choices run from 30 seconds to 1 hour, with the fastest interval and the number of sites at 30 seconds set by your plan, as the table on the paid media page shows.
Read the cause and route the fix
The down alert names the cause and what each location saw. In our experience you can forward it by cause, to the person who owns the fix:
- The certificate's owner. Gets the TLS/SSL error.
- Whoever manages the domain's DNS. Gets DNS resolution failed.
- The host or the developer. Gets a Timeout, Connection failed or a 5xx status.
- The firewall owner, or whoever moved the page. Gets a 403 or a 404.
The US, Europe and Asia probes get up to 10 minutes to confirm or contradict a failure, and a failure every region contradicts sends no down alert. See failure reasons and the guide to telling a regional failure from a full outage.
Alerts to whoever can pause the campaign
Each alert rule is one channel with its own recipients, so a page can have a Slack rule for the channel your media team watches and an email rule for the campaign owner. Slack doesn't carry the slow-response alert, so add an email, Discord, webhook or browser push rule for it. OctoPing checks the URL you enter and can't see your ad platform, so pausing the campaign or swapping the final URL is a step your team takes. A form that fails while the page still loads isn't flagged, because the page returns a 200. See alert channels and rules.
The content check on campaign copy
When a page's main text differs from its last snapshot, the content check sends the changed lines. Paragraph text such as terms, policies and offer wording is what it keeps. Navigation, buttons and footers may be missing from what it reads, and on some page builders so may headlines and prices. If it finds no main text, as on a page a script builds in the browser, it compares the raw HTML instead, and a new asset file name then counts as a change. Before you rely on it, edit a line you care about and check that the next run reports it. It only notices a change, so a promo that stays live after the sale sends nothing. See website change detection.
Maintenance windows for planned launches
Schedule a maintenance window for the sites a launch touches before you swap a URL or release a new version of the page. While it runs, those sites stop sending down, reminder, slow-response and status-change alerts, and the minutes stay out of uptime. Certificate, domain and change alerts keep arriving. If the page is still failing when the window ends, the next failing check alerts. See maintenance windows.
Setup outline
Add the final URL and switch on the checks
Follow add your first site with the address your campaign links to, then use the table above for the checks.
Route the alerts and send a test
Use Send Test on each rule. The guides cover SSL expiry alerts in Slack and client domain expiry alerts.
Schedule a window for each launch
Write the name for readers, because a published status page that lists the site shows it.
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, and every plan includes all the checks on every site. 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 the final URL of your busiest landing page to see it working.
Last reviewed
Related
- ForMonitor ad landing pages for downtimeHear when a landing page behind your ads is down or returning errors, with the failure reason and the regions that saw it, sent to Slack, email or your tools.
- ForWebsite monitoring for marketing teamsHear when your site or a landing page breaks, and hand IT or your vendor the failure reason, the regions that saw it and when it started. Alerts go to Slack.
- FeatureWebsite uptime monitoring with the cause in every alertCheck client sites as often as every 30 seconds, see why a check failed, and flag slow responses as degraded. Planned work stays out of your uptime numbers.
- FeatureSSL certificate expiry monitoring with early alertsGet an alert before a client's SSL certificate expires, with the days left and the issuer. On by default for every site, with a warning window you set per site.
- FeatureWebsite change detection with a diff in every alertWatch a page for text changes and get the changed lines in the alert. OctoPing compares readable text instead of raw HTML to keep false alarms down.
- GuideSend SSL certificate expiry alerts to SlackConnect Slack, choose how many days ahead to warn, and get a message in your team's channel when a client's certificate is close to expiring.
- DocsMaintenance windowsSchedule planned work so down alerts are held back and the time stays out of uptime, with the rules for the edges of a window and how it shows on a status page.