The category
PPC monitoring
PPC monitoring is the continuous checking of a paid campaign while it is running — the numbers it produces and the page the click lands on — so that a campaign which has stopped working reaches a person instead of a month-end review.
Most of the category runs inside the ad account: disapproved ads, budget pacing, bid rules, settings that drifted. That work is worth doing and it is not what this page is about. Two kinds of failure live outside the account, and between them they are where the expensive ones are.
Four failures in the numbers
These run on whatever figures arrive, from any system that can report one. None of them needs to see inside an ad account. The intervals are the real schedules, read off the job table.
A number stopped arriving
every minuteConversions were reporting every hour and then stopped, while spend carried on. Nobody gets an alert for a chart that simply ends.
Missing, zero and late are three different states, and every tool that treats them as one is why a dead campaign looks like a quiet week.
A cost passed the line you set
every minuteCost per acquisition through its ceiling, spend rate above its cap — the threshold you would have checked on Monday, checked continuously.
A guardrail in a spreadsheet is a number somebody has to remember to look at. This one is a row in a database that pages when it breaks.
A target went off pace
every 15 minutesNot that the goal was missed — that at the current rate it is going to be, while there is still a month left to do something about it.
Month-end is when a missed target becomes a fact. Pace is when it is still a decision.
Two systems disagree about the same number
every 15 minutesThe ad platform claims 140 conversions; your database has 96. One of them is wrong and the gap has been there for a week.
Nobody reconciles two dashboards by eye. A number you cannot trust is worse than one you do not have, because you will act on it.
Six failures past the click
The ad account can be in perfect health while every click it buys arrives somewhere useless. These are checks on the destination itself, fetched as a phone, every five minutes. Five of the six answer 200 OK; the sixth answers with a refusal that an uptime monitor files as downtime and an ad platform does not notice at all.
- Sev-1The page says it is gone
- Sev-1The click lands somewhere else
- Sev-1The page renders broken
- Sev-1Conversions stopped while spend carried on
- Sev-2Fine on your laptop, broken for the click
- Sev-2The page is refusing visitors
Each one, with the reasoning behind it and what it costs to miss, is on landing page monitoring — that is the page for this half of the job. The most expensive of the six is the soft 404.
Three of them you can test on a campaign URL without an account: the soft 404 checker, the redirect tracer, and what your server sends a phone. The other three need history, which is the difference between a spot check and monitoring.
PPC monitoring is not PPC reporting
They are usually sold together and they answer opposite questions. A report is assembled for somebody else to read on a schedule, and it describes a period that has already closed. Monitoring has no schedule and no reader: it produces nothing at all until something is wrong, and then it interrupts a person.
This matters more than it sounds. A tool that sends a client a beautiful report every Monday will happily let a campaign spend into a dead page from Tuesday to Friday, and then report it accurately the following Monday. The report was never wrong. It was just late by the entire length of the problem.
VampireAI does not build client-facing reports, and if a scheduled white-label PDF is what you are shopping for, one of the reporting tools is the right purchase. This is the other half of the job.
How often to monitor a PPC campaign
Two different clocks, because two different things are being watched. The destination is fetched every five minutes, and what that interval is worth is arithmetic on your spend rate — the table for it is on landing page monitoring, along with why an hourly check costs twelve times as much as a five-minute one.
The numbers run on their own clocks, listed against each check above and taken from the job table rather than chosen for this page. A feed going quiet is checked every minute because it is the cheapest question there is — did a row arrive. Pace and disagreement run quarter-hourly because they weigh a number against a trend, and a trend recomputed every sixty seconds is noise on a schedule.
Whichever interval you pick, it only buys the detection half. 207 of INC-2291’s 213 minutes were not detection — they were a person asleep, which is why the alert arrives with the decision already written.
What it needs from you
The destination checks need a URL and nothing else: no OAuth, no account access, no review process. The number checks need the numbers, and today there is exactly one way they arrive — you send them, one POST with a token, from a cron job, a warehouse query or twelve lines of Python.
That is worth being plain about rather than dressing up: direct pull-based connectors to the ad platforms are not built yet. What exists instead is an open door that takes any number from any system, which is why there is no OAuth queue and nothing to wait on us for. When the platform connectors land they will be a convenience on top of that door, not a replacement for it.
See it monitoring something
The demo is a working copy loaded with INC-2291 — the check that caught it six minutes in, the incident it opened, and the prepared decision that would have stopped the spend.
PPC monitoring, answered plainly
What is PPC monitoring?
PPC monitoring is the continuous checking of a paid campaign while it is running, rather than the review of it afterwards. It covers two things a report cannot: the numbers the campaign produces — spend, conversions, cost per acquisition — and the destination the click lands on. The output is not a chart. It is an alert to a named person, raised while the money is still moving.
What should you monitor in a PPC campaign?
Four things in the numbers and six on the other side of the click. In the numbers: a metric that stopped arriving, a cost through a ceiling you set, a target drifting off pace, and two systems reporting different values for the same figure. Past the click: a soft 404, a redirect to somewhere else, a page rendering broken, conversions stopping while spend continues, a failure that only happens on a phone, and a page refusing visitors outright. Every one of the six returns HTTP 200 to a status-code monitor.
How often should you monitor PPC campaigns?
Set the interval by the spend rate, not by the reporting calendar. At $58.59 a minute across 3 campaigns — one real advertiser’s rate — a five-minute check caps a single failure at $293 and an hourly check caps it at $3,515. Daily checks make the cap the size of a day’s budget.
Is PPC monitoring the same as PPC reporting?
No, and the difference is who the output is for. A PPC report is assembled for somebody else to read on a schedule — a client, a director, a board — and it describes a period that has already closed. Monitoring has no schedule and no reader: it runs continuously and produces nothing at all until something is wrong, at which point it interrupts a person. A tool that emails a beautiful report every Monday can let a campaign spend into a dead page from Tuesday to Friday without a word.