Michael Roebuck's Blog: October 2009

Is your website up and working properly? I received a call from my sister over the weekend who stated she published her Yahoo Store website and since the publish, could not add any items to the shopping cart.

This type of thing rarely happens at 11:00am on a Wednesday when everyone is in the office. No, Whenever Yahoo or Google have a meltdown for whatever reason or wants to reject an ad, it occurs at 10:00pm on a Friday or Saturday night. My sister called me around 2:00pm on Saturday afternoon as I was driving in the country looking at property with one of my kids. Over 30 minutes from home and an Internet connection (There is only so much one can do with an iPhone!)

Yahoo stated in an email sent to customers today that it had a power outage...

"Dear Yahoo! Merchant Solutions customer, We experienced short service interruptions that were noted on our system status page. These affected, at different intervals, page-serving and add-to-cart functionality for some visitors to Yahoo! Merchant Solutions and Yahoo! Store sites. As a result of this short service interruption, some merchants were also unable to access their Store Manager for a period of time. We would like to take this opportunity to apologize for these interruptions, and to provide you with information on their root cause."

The letter further goes on to explain what happened and the safety precautions in place to prevent further disruptions and so forth. It was a nice, informative letter and I'm sure much appreciated by the customers.

I believe my sisters problem was an affect of this power outage. I went home and her website was performing fine. I published a few times and all seemed to be in working order. Only my Saturday afternoon activities were cut short. Maybe Yahoo should send my son a t-shirt or something to make up for his lost afternoon.

Anyway, things happen and sites go down periodically. It's a fact of life. But you should know exactly when and for how long these events take place. Don't just assume you had a bad sales day when in reality your Google PPC was turned off for reaching it's budget or you accidentally password protected your entire website (Yes, this happened to a client once! See below)

All Web Promotion monitors several clients' websites roughly every 10 minutes. Meaning if there site ever goes down, I'm paged within 20 minutes of the failure. I monitor pages within the website as well as the secure shopping cart. I'm working on a program that will actually add an item to the shopping cart to ensure all aspects of the site are operational.

We also monitor Google Pay Per Click accounts. Meaning if your Google account is ever shut off due to reaching it's budget limit or some other reason, we are paged as well.

Along with monitoring, I have systems in place that automatically read email and if an email is received that contains a pre-programmed actionable trigger, I get paged and the email forwarded to my phone.

I do all these things not because I like to ruin my nights and weekends but I feel you need to know when something isn't working right. Some clients pay me money to ensure there site is monitored and all systems are a go. (Yes, I charge my sister. It's payback for her picking on me while growing up)

Why I started Monitoring Websites:
One Saturday afternoon I was having lunch with my wife and her family at a restaurant (Pappa's in Spring Valley) when I received a phone call from a major client stating his website was not working. I went home and it turned out the client had password protected his entire website. Yahoo Stores have the ability to set up an account access which basically password protects the entire site. He accidentally activated this feature the day before and didn't know how. Because his sales stopped, he figured his website had a problem. He lost 2 days worth of sales because of this. Fortunately, it wasn't my error!

Pay Per Click Monitoring Scenario
Client had a product that was mentioned on nationally syndicated TV show. The TV show drew so much click traffic that they exceeded daily budget and was shut off. Since sales were justified, we increased budget and client continued to receive sales.

In short, be prepared. Knowledge is Power. Know when your site is up and when and why it may be down! Contact me if you have any questions.

Labels: monitoring, ppc