How to stop ads when a page is down?

[Jon_King]

Ocasionally a site goes offline or a targeted aff page is unreachable; what is the best method for turning off adwords spending when this happens?

How is one alerted to these outages and is it possible to automate the temporary suspension of ad buys during these outages?

[koncept]

Now that would be an amazing feature! .. if adwords would stop showing your ad when the site is down. However, that would mean adwords would have to check whether your site was up BEFORE displaying your ad each time. Wouldn't that tie up alot of resources as well as slow down the displaying of ads?

If I KNOW my site is down because, for instance, my host is planning an outage for technical reasons, I simply go in and pause the campaign. Old fashioned like.

[Kobayashi]

In theory they already stop running an ad (technically they disapprove it) if a site is unreachable although whether they determine that after each user clicks your ad or through some other method I have no idea. I say in theory as although it has happened a couple times to me over the years there have been many other times when a site was unreachable and the ad was never disapproved.

[edited by: Kobayashi at 7:43 am (utc) on Dec. 16, 2006]

[RhinoFish]

there are commercial monitoring products that will do this, but it's critical to work to resolve your uptime than it is to automate reactions to it.