SEM Tips: Dealing with Website Outages

If you happened to be online yesterday morning and wanted to read the news in Sydney you would have noticed the Sydney Morning Herald was down and out for the count for close to an hour with a touch of the dreaded “Yellow Fever”.

While this happens to the best and biggest of websites, what made the loss of thousands of dollars in ad revenue due to the site outage worse was the loss of precious advertising budget being spent on Paid Search traffic (Example of SMH paid ad below during site outage).

Moral of the story from yesterday’s brief Sydney Morning Herald episode is simple – monitoring your website is absolutely crucial and even more so when you are sending thousands of dollars worth of paid traffic to your site each day. You can however limit the SEM budget being spent while the site is down in the following ways:

1. Set up SMS Alerts to be sent to critical team members – When the site goes down and when it gets put back up: This should include your Tech Team and SEM managers; if SEM management is outsourced then one agency team member can be nominated to receive the SMS and be asked to act on it.

2. Communication – Ask your tech dept. to clearly communicate to the different stakeholders around how much time it will take to have the site fixed and running in a stable manner.

3. Share Maintenance Schedule – Openly sharing the site maintenance schedule with your SEM managers will help them plan better and reduce any confusion or budget wastage

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 10:04 and is filed under Pay Per Click (PPC). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.