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Monitoring your landing pages

Monitoring your landing pages regularly lets Webmarketer make sure they are properly reachable and working as expected. A page that is unreachable or slow to load can lead to a significant waste of your advertising budget, since visitors may leave the page before it even shows up.

Beyond wasted advertising budget, technical issues such as URL parameters being dropped during redirects can compromise the tracking of your campaigns. If those parameters are altered or removed, Webmarketer cannot identify the advertising source behind the visit. The interactions coming from that campaign or ad group are then attributed to sources such as direct, social or referral traffic, thereby skewing your performance analysis.

This is why Webmarketer also monitors whether URL parameters are properly preserved.

Criteria​

For optimal tracking, your landing pages must meet the following criteria:

  • Reachable within fewer than 5 redirects: A redirect chain that is too long can slow the page down and hurt the user experience.
  • URL parameters preserved across redirects: It is crucial that URL parameters, including their case (upper and lower), are preserved throughout the redirects to guarantee accurate tracking.
  • HTTP 200 status code on the final page: The final landing page must return an HTTP 200 status code, indicating the request succeeded.

Measuring load time​

Load time is measured from the first request until the HTML content of the final page has been fully received. When there are redirects, the time of each HTTP request, including DNS resolution, adds up to the total measured duration.

That measurement reflects the time experienced by a visitor clicking an ad. A load time that is too long may prompt the user to leave before the page shows up, reducing the effectiveness of your campaign.

User-Agent​

The Webmarketer bot always identifies itself with a specific User-Agent, so you can target it precisely.

Webmarketer/AvailabilityChecker-1.0 (information: https://doc.webmarketer.io/docs/availability-checks)

Monitoring frequency​

Webmarketer checks your landing pages every 10 minutes. To avoid overloading your servers, the checker bot limits itself to 1 URL per second per project.

If there are more than 600 URLs to monitor, each URL is then checked less frequently.

Turning monitoring off​

If you want to turn off Webmarketer's landing page monitoring, you can do so through your robots.txt file.

To exclude the Webmarketer bot, add the following lines to the file:

User-Agent: Webmarketer-AvailabilityChecker
Disallow: /
info

The monitoring feature makes calls to the URLs found in the ad platforms. If you use intermediate URLs to count clicks, you may need to exclude the traffic coming from the Webmarketer User-Agent. Otherwise, the URL loads performed by the checker bot could be counted as real clicks, skewing your statistics.

Troubleshooting​

Why might a landing page not be monitored?

  • Excluded by the robots.txt file: if your robots.txt file denies access to the Webmarketer bot, the page is not monitored.
  • Inactive or filtered campaign: if the campaign this URL belongs to is not active, or is filtered out on the traffic source page, no monitoring is performed.

Why is a page still being visited even though it is excluded by the robots.txt file?

The bot name specified in your robots.txt file may not exactly match the User-Agent used by the Webmarketer bot. Make sure the bot name is spelled correctly for the exclusion to take effect.