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What a dead landing page actually costs

Most “wasted ad spend” numbers are estimates stacked on assumptions. This one is not. A page that cannot convert converts nobody, so every dollar spent pointing at it is waste, and the figure is multiplication: minutes broken × spend rate.

How to calculate wasted ad spend

Assume the destination is dead for 3 hours and 33 minutes — the length of INC-2291, and a realistic gap between a midnight deploy and somebody in the next timezone clicking their own ad.

Spend spread evenly across the month. Real accounts are lumpier, and an outage during peak hours costs more than this table says.

Why we will not tell you what you lost

The tempting number is revenue: conversions you would have made, times value. It is unknowable. It depends on what those visitors would have done, which nobody observed, because the page was broken. Any tool printing that figure is multiplying your historical conversion rate by traffic and calling the product a measurement.

So the interface says unknown where a number requires a guess, and prints only the one it can defend. That is a worse headline and a better product — the first time a customer checks a figure and finds it invented, every other figure becomes suspect.

When landing page monitoring is worth paying for

Below roughly $50k a month, a rare afternoon outage costs a few hundred dollars and monitoring it is not worth a subscription. We would rather say so than sell you something. It changes above that, and it changes immediately for an agency, where the same failure is not an expense but a conversation with a client about their money.