I built WebMon because I got tired of finding out my sites were broken hours after the fact. But talking to affiliate marketers over the past few months, I've realised you lot have it way worse than I ever did.
When my site goes down, I lose some traffic. When your landing page goes down - or worse, silently changes to a "this offer has ended" page - you're burning ad spend for nothing. And nobody in the chain is going to tell you about it.
So here's how I'd set up monitoring if I were running paid traffic campaigns. No fluff, just the practical stuff.
Your Funnel Is a Chain of Trust (With No Trust)
A typical affiliate campaign has something like four or five hops between the ad click and the offer page:
Ad click
→ Your tracker (Voluum, Bemob, etc.)
→ Network click URL
→ Advertiser tracking
→ Offer page
Every one of those is controlled by a different company. The advertiser can rotate the offer at 2 AM without telling anyone. The network can migrate their tracking infrastructure over a weekend. Your tracker domain could get flagged by a registrar. I've seen all of these happen, and in every case the person running the campaign was the last to find out.
The fix is dead simple: monitor the important URLs and get alerts when things change.
Start with HTTP Monitors
Add your landing page URL (or your full tracking link) as an HTTP monitor. WebMon hits it every few minutes and alerts you if it returns anything other than a 200. Server down, domain expired, SSL broken - you'll know within minutes instead of when you check your stats at lunch.
WebMon follows redirects automatically, so if you monitor your tracking link directly, it'll trace through every hop and check the final destination. If any server in the chain starts throwing 500s, you'll see it.
I'd set up HTTP monitors for:
- Your tracking link (catches the whole chain)
- Your own landing pages if you host pre-landers
- Your tracker's dashboard or status page
That covers the "is it alive?" question. But there's a subtler problem.
The Sneaky Failures: When the Page Is "Up" But Wrong
Here's the scenario that keeps affiliate marketers up at night. The offer page returns a perfectly healthy 200 OK. No errors. No timeouts. But the advertiser quietly swapped the creative, or the product's been pulled, or the page now says "offer expired" in big letters. Your HTTP monitor says everything is fine because technically, the server responded correctly.
This is where keyword monitoring earns its keep. Set up a keyword monitor on the offer page with something specific to the actual offer - the product name, a price, a particular CTA. Not "Buy Now" (every page has that) but something like "ProWidget 3.0" or "60% off until March." If that text vanishes, you get an alert.
I've seen people catch offer rotations within minutes this way. The alternative is checking your conversion stats hours later and wondering why everything flatlined.
Redirect Chain Monitoring
This one we built specifically because affiliates asked for it.
Toggle on Alert on Redirect Chain Changes on any HTTP monitor and WebMon starts comparing the full redirect chain between checks. New hop appears? Alert. URL in the chain changes? Alert. Final destination moves? Alert.
The really useful bit is the expected final URL setting. Set it to your offer page and you'll only get alerted when the destination changes - not when the network swaps a tracking domain in the middle of the chain, which happens fairly often and usually doesn't matter.
What I'd Actually Set Up for a Campaign
If I were running a paid traffic campaign right now, I'd create three monitors:
First, an HTTP monitor on my full tracking link with redirect chain alerts turned on and the expected URL set to the offer page. That covers link breakage and destination changes in one go.
Second, a keyword monitor pointed directly at the offer page URL (bypassing the redirects) looking for text specific to the current offer. That catches silent creative rotations and expired promotions.
Third, an HTTP monitor on my tracker itself - Voluum, Bemob, whatever. If the tracker goes down, everything else is academic.
That's maybe two minutes of setup. You could do it while waiting for a campaign to get approved.
One More Thing: Security Scanning
If you run your own landing pages or pre-landers, turn on content security scanning on those monitors. WebMon checks for injected scripts, phishing patterns, defacement, and Google ban indicators on every check cycle.
Getting your domain flagged as "deceptive" by Chrome is the kind of problem that outlasts any individual campaign. Catching a compromise early - before Google notices - saves you from a much worse cleanup job later.
The Uncomfortable Maths
Here's the thing that convinced me this actually matters. If you're spending £200/day on traffic and your offer page dies at midnight, by the time you wake up and check at 8 AM, you've wasted £66. For a monitor that takes 60 seconds to create. On a free plan.
The maths only gets worse the more you spend.
Running campaigns? Set up your first monitor - takes about a minute. Free plan, 5 monitors, no card required.