Monitor Your Landing Pages!
Don’t make the same mistake I did. On Tuesday, I spent over $300 on adword traffic to a page that was not available. I don’t know what happened. Everything was working fine for the past month, all of the sudden, this page was no longer available and everyone that went to it received a 404, page not available error message.
I found out about the error when I logged into my ebay account to see that impressions and clicks were down. At first I thought nothing of it since eBay tends to be slow when it comes to reporting impressions/clicks. I then logged into my adwords account to see how many people had clicked on my ads, and the number was way above what ebay was reporting. I decided to test one of my landing pages, and lo and behold, I received the famous hostgator 404 error page.
I contacted HostGator to let them know what was going on. It seemed as if something was wrong with the rewrite rule. I don’t know how that could’ve happened. I didn’t log into my account or make any changes to it in a few days. Things are back up and running normally.
To protect myself from losing money like this again, I’ve signed up for a little service called Montastic. Montastic is a free website monitoring tool that will alert you via email when your site’s down it’s back up. Montastic will check your site every 10 minutes.
Thank You to Mark Wielgus from 45n5 for replying to my frantic twitter messages and for referring me to Chad from cdfnetworks.com’s “Don’t forget to monitor your landing pages” blog post!
Thanks Johnathan! Very informative post.
I’ve been definitely been there before as well. There is nothing worse than knowing that you threw away that cash.
Thanks for the tip on the monitoring service, I’ll have to give it a try.