Marketing teams are extraordinarily good at measuring things.
Click-through rates. Conversion rates. Cost per acquisition. Return on ad spend. Quality scores. Bounce rates. Session duration. Attribution windows. Most marketing stacks include half a dozen tools dedicated to tracking, reporting, and optimizing every step of the customer journey.
And yet, almost universally, there’s a gap in what gets measured: whether the website is actually up.
Not whether it’s performing well. Not whether the UX is optimized. Whether it is simply online and responding. This is the most foundational question in digital marketing — because if the answer is no, none of the other metrics matter — and it’s the one most marketing teams have no system to answer.
The Assumption Nobody Questions
Most marketing teams operate under an implicit assumption: the website is IT’s problem. If something breaks, someone in tech will notice and fix it. The marketing team’s job is to drive traffic; somebody else’s job is to make sure there’s something for that traffic to land on.
This assumption works right up until it doesn’t. And when it fails, it fails expensively — because the marketing team has been spending money to send people to a broken destination, and nobody noticed.
The gap between “the site went down” and “the marketing team found out” is where budget disappears. In a world where campaigns run 24 hours a day, where automated bidding doesn’t sleep, where retargeting follows users across devices at all hours — waiting for IT to notice and tell you is not a monitoring strategy.
What Actually Happens When a Site Goes Down During a Campaign
The sequence is familiar to anyone who has lived through it.
A landing page goes down — a server error, a caching issue, a plugin conflict after an update. The error happens at 2pm on a Tuesday. The campaign keeps running. Traffic keeps flowing. The platform keeps spending.
By 4pm, conversions have dropped to zero, but the account manager is in a meeting. By 5pm, someone notices the conversion rate looks wrong in the dashboard. By 5:30pm, someone manually checks the landing page and finds the error. By 6pm, the page is fixed and the campaign is back on.
Four hours of campaign spend directed at a broken page. Depending on the campaign’s daily budget, that could be anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand pounds in wasted spend — plus the revenue from conversions that didn’t happen, plus the damage to Quality Scores from users bouncing off an error page.
And because the downtime shows up in the data as “low conversion period” rather than “site was broken,” it can distort optimization decisions for weeks afterward.
Why Marketing Teams Are the Right People to Own This
There’s a compelling argument that website monitoring belongs in the marketing stack, not just the IT stack.
IT monitors infrastructure. Servers, databases, deployment pipelines, network uptime. These are valid concerns, and IT teams often have monitoring tools for them. But IT monitoring is typically oriented toward the technical layer — and a landing page can fail in ways that don’t register as an infrastructure problem.
A page that returns a 200 status code but shows an empty white screen due to a JavaScript error. A page that loads but has a broken form so nobody can convert. A page that works fine on desktop but shows an error on mobile. These are failures that matter enormously to campaign performance and not at all to an infrastructure dashboard.
Marketing teams are the ones running campaigns to these pages. Marketing teams are the ones with the most immediate financial stake in those pages working correctly. And marketing teams are the ones who can take the most meaningful immediate action when a page goes down — pausing spend — without waiting for a ticket to be resolved.
Owning the monitoring means being able to act on it.
What a Marketing-Appropriate Monitoring Setup Looks Like
The requirements for marketing teams are slightly different from the developer use case.
Alert speed matters more than alert detail. A marketing professional getting a downtime alert doesn’t need a stack trace. They need to know which URL is down, how long it’s been down, and who to contact. The alert needs to reach them immediately — not in a daily summary, not in a weekly report.
Coverage should match active campaigns. Every URL that’s currently receiving paid traffic should be monitored. This includes landing pages, thank-you pages, and any page in a conversion funnel that’s actively being driven by spend. When a campaign ends, the monitoring can be deprioritized. When a new campaign launches, monitoring should be set up before the first ad goes live.
Multiple alert recipients. The person who gets the alert should be the person who can act on it — which in most agencies means the account manager or media buyer, not just the developer.
Kikloper’s instant alerts are designed for exactly this: immediate notification the moment a monitored URL stops responding, delivered to whoever needs to know. Multi-channel delivery means alerts reach you by email and push notification — so downtime during an active campaign gets flagged within minutes, not hours.
Adding a landing page to monitoring takes about two minutes. Setting up alert preferences takes another two. For the cost of four minutes before a campaign goes live, you have continuous coverage for the entire campaign run.
The Gap Is Simple to Close
Website monitoring isn’t a complex addition to a marketing stack. It doesn’t require IT involvement, a lengthy procurement process, or a technical implementation.
It requires adding the URLs you’re driving traffic to, configuring who gets alerted when something breaks, and letting the system watch while you focus on campaign performance.
Kikloper covers uptime monitoring, SSL tracking, and domain expiry from one dashboard, with real-time alerts that reach you the moment something changes. The Solo plan covers 10 URLs at $5/month — less than the cost of an hour of wasted campaign spend.
14-day free trial, no credit card required.
You measure everything. Start measuring whether the site is up. Start your free trial at Kikloper and add your active landing pages before the next campaign goes live.