Reading
Uptime monitoring vs landing page monitoring
They answer different questions. Uptime monitoring asks did the server respond. Landing page monitoring asks can the page a paid click lands on still convert. Every expensive failure lives in the gap between those two sentences.
| Failure | Uptime monitor | Landing page monitor |
|---|---|---|
| Server is down | Caught | Caught |
| Page returns 404 | Caught | Caught |
| Page returns 200 and says "page not found" | Reported healthy | Caught — the body is read, and the matched phrase recorded |
| URL now redirects to /signin or the homepage | Reported healthy — the status belongs to wherever it landed | Caught — the destination path is compared to the one you registered |
| Consent wall or interstitial that only fires on mobile | Not checked — desktop user agent | Caught — fetched as a phone, because that is who clicks ads |
| Page is fine but conversions stopped while spend continued | Out of scope | Caught — an empty payload on a feed that cannot be zero is a failure, not a quiet hour |
| One failure produces four alerts | Typical | Grouped into one incident with a timeline |
| The same condition returns every hour | A new alert each time | One incident with a count on it |
Do you still need uptime monitoring?
This is not a replacement argument. An uptime monitor watches infrastructure and does it well; it is checking a different thing on a different schedule for a different audience. The point is that pointing one at a landing page and calling that covered is the mistake — it will report 200 for every failure in the second half of that table.
How to tell which one you are missing
Take the exact URL from a live ad. Open it on your phone, on cellular, in a private window. If what you see is not the offer, your monitors have been green through all of it.
See what the check reports
The demo has a soft-404'd destination in it, with the body it actually landed on and the incident that came out of it.