Day 22 of 100 Days of AdWords Help: Save with Site Monitoring

For Day 22 of 100 Days of AdWords Help, we’re going to talk about one of the easiest ways to avoid a headache when working with AdWords.

It’s something that has helped make our clients happy and prevented suspended accounts. The best part is; it only takes a few minutes to set up.

What Happens When Your Site Goes Down?

What happens to your AdWords Ads when your site goes down? Does AdWords automatically know and stop serving ads to your domain? Or does it keep serving ads, leaving you to hold the bill for sending traffic to a downed website? Unfortunately, it’s the latter.

If your landing pages go down while your AdWords Account is enabled, this could spell trouble.

• You will pay for clicks that don’t lead customers anywhere. If your site is down and your AdWords is active, anywhere for a few hours to an entire day, you’ll be paying for clicks. In a large historic account, this might mean 1,000’s of dollars of wasted spend.
• You risk getting suspended or bulk-disapproved. Once Google pings your site and realizes you are sending traffic to a landing page that doesn’t work, they’re going to bulk-disapprove all of your ads. Repeat this process again and again, and you’ll risk suspension, as an unreliable advertiser.

How to Automatically Turn Off Your Ads If Your Site is Down

The fastest, easiest way to prevent wasting money and getting suspended is to install something automated that will auto-pause your ads if your site is down.

At Search Scientists, we’ve used a lot of different tools to complete this goal. It’s saved our clients 1,000’s.

Update Your AdWords Notification Settings

• It’s as simple as going to “Settings” then “Notification Settings”. Learn more about that here.

Use a Tool to Help

There are a lot of tools out there to help auto-pause your ads if your site goes down. You’ll want to familiarize yourself with setting up an AdWords Script. An AdWords Script is a piece of javascript that can activate at predetermined times. We’ll cover AdWords Scripts and all they can do in future Days of AdWords Help. For now, I can assure you installing these Auto-Pause scripts are easy to use. Here are a few we’ve used:

• Free AdWords Script from Google Developers: Link Checker (Free)
• Optmyzr’s Landing Page Watch Dog: Landing Page Watch (What we currently use – Paid)
• Russel’s Free AdWords Script: Report Broken URL Script (Free – Hasn’t been tested in almost a year by us)

Install Free Website Monitoring

On top of auto-pausing ads, you should also set up a website monitoring for any website you use. There are lots of tools that can alert you if your site goes down, by text message or email. At Search Scientists, we use Pingdom. You’ll be surprised by your actual uptime. For Search Scientists, we were down 5 minutes at about 130am a few days ago.

The Future of Website Uptime and AdWords Landing Pages

It’s in everyone’s best interest to stop ads once your website goes down. Users don’t want to reach a 404 error page, you don’t want to waste money, and AdWords doesn’t want to teach people that ads lead to a dead website. By improving their own system of auto-pausing, they’ll help achieve all three goals. I’d like to believe in the future, AdWords will do the pausing automatically for you. For now, the three scripts posted earlier should be a big help in the health of your account.