What Marketers Need To Know About Downtime

What is Website Downtime?

What comes to mind when you think of downtime? A website crash, right? That is the hot term you will often hear in the media around the holidays or following the release of a highly anticipated new product when the website of a major retailer goes down. While an inaccessible site might be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of downtime, that is only one of many digital disasters classed as downtime.

Downtime, to put it simply, is any period of time during which a webpage is not available to visitors or not functioning well enough for users to complete a task.

Common Examples of Downtime

Given the above definition, it is worth noting that your website can indeed be experiencing downtime even when it is up and accessible. So what does downtime look like if your site has not crashed and is online? The answers are numerous, but a few common examples, short of a complete website outage, include:

• Inaccessible pages: Whether resulting from a page being off-line or connection errors (i.e. err_connection_timed_out or err_connection_refused), even one unavailable page counts as downtime.
• Slow loading pages: Excessively slow loading times count as downtime too, because they can turn users away and result in function errors, like e-commerce transactions timing out.
• Page errors: Pages that load blank, or display the wrong content are also experiencing downtime.  
• Web application malfunctions: Forms, shopping carts, payment processes, etc., that fail to allow users to complete their tasks, even when present on accessible, visible, functioning pages still count as incidents of downtime.

Downtime and Digital Marketing

Downtime can damage your brand, hurt sales, and negatively impact search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO Singapore) efforts. So what can you do as a marketer to protect against the risks of downtime and prevent it from undermining your paid media campaigns? The answer is simple: employ an automated website monitoring tool. You may have thought that website monitoring was solely the domain of IT professionals, but you were wrong. The truth is, even if you are lucky enough to have in-house IT support, they are not going to be available to closely monitor all of the things you need to keep an eye on for digital marketing. Things like:

• Faulty forms: lead generation and contact form errors are easy to miss without automated monitoring.
• Down landing pages: When running any digital marketing campaign, but especially paid media campaigns missing a down landing page spells wasted time, budget and lost return on investment (ROI).
• Page defacement: Whether you are working in-house or at an agency, catching page content errors early, can help you flag possible hacking activity to IT before a site is compromised and or customers notice errors.
• Broken links: If you are driving traffic to a page with broken links, you are risking undermining trust with prospects that could lead to lost conversions. That truth holds even if the broken links are not critical to any transactional activities.

Automating Downtime Monitoring

There are many automated website monitoring tools on the market that are free or low cost. Unfortunately, most are either overly simple, checking little more than if a website is online and available or excessively complex, requiring IT support for set up and configuration, as well as training to understand alerts and reports.

Luckily there is PageChecker. PageChecker was designed by marketers for marketers and empowers marketing professionals to monitor the things that matter most to them, independently. With PageChecker’s automated website monitoring in place, you will receive clear, actionable alerts when relevant instances of downtime occur, enabling you to pause your paid digital media campaigns while fixing the issues.

To learn more about PageChecker’s website monitoring for marketers, contact us on info@pagechecker.io.