Show HN: KillSwitch - Uptime Monitoring With Google AdWords Integration

20 points by enigmabomb 12 years ago | 12 comments

Coincidentally, I wanted to launch this yesterday but HackerNews was down--

I built KillSwitch (http://Killswit.ch) with the busy agency in mind. Many digital agencies don't host the sites they advertise for and this can cause a problem when there is downtime. It's not uncommon for a client website to go down for hours in the middle of the night while traffic is being sent to the site. KillSwitch monitors the site every minute for connectivity and in the event of downtime notifies stakeholders. If the site is not returned to service after a user-adjustable threshold, the AdWords campaign is paused automatically. Upon restoration of connectivity, it's started again.

This is the most M of MVP's but I've really enjoyed building it. If you have any feedback, I'd be happy to hear it. Josh@Killswit.ch

Stack: PHP with Laravel 4 (http://laravel.com/) Bootstrap 3 Dashboard (Gumby on the homepage) Amazon Web Services Ubuntu 12.04 Local dev with Vagrant & Virtual box Deployment with Capistrano

ScottWhigham 12 years ago |

One question for other Adwords users - have you noticed a penalty for putting the campaign in pause mode?

Years ago (3+) we used to pause our campaigns during known holiday times - we sell to mostly business-minded users and found that, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we were getting clicks that would never, ever convert (3+ years of data). So we started pausing campaigns during those times. We found that when we re-enabled those campaigns we would get much worse results for as much as two weeks after we re-enabled them.

Being that this is HN, I realize that 100 people can't want to argue/disprove/etc (or be "captiuous") but I'm telling you now that we knew that it was due to pausing rather than "external factors". I'd just like to hear from anyone else to see if they had the same experiences.

enigmabomb 12 years ago | |

Hey Scott,

The adrank could be affected by things like this but here's what I would ask you to consider: Google is very sly about measuring on page performance metrics. If you have downtime, how many visitors do you think are going to return to the Search Engine Results Page? Google knows this and could use it as a an indicator of a poor performing ad. My service is different from manual pausing for this reason. Here's a good article on the type of work they're doing to create adrank: http://vuurr.com/impact-of-google-adwords-quality-score-on-c...

Specifically, I've not had a "penalty" for pausing ads myself but the ads were typically performing well. I pause the bad ones pretty quickly.

Cheers,

Josh

rfergie 12 years ago | |

I have seen what appeared to be a penalty from pausing a campaign once.

More detailed write-up at http://www.eanalytica.com/blog/unforseen-risks-when-stopping...

Perhaps similar to your experience?

enigmabomb 12 years ago |

I'd also be happy to entertain any questions you might have about the solo-founder undertaking and how I arrived at this particular niche of monitoring.

ramenable 12 years ago |

Clickable - http://Killswit.ch

ramenable 12 years ago | |

Some feedback

1. Don't force the user to enter the phone number. I don't mind giving out my email address, but my phone number is only if you win my trust.

2. You need to have some form of trial before requiring a credit card. If that's not possible then at least a video demo and screenshots.

edit: formatting

Killswitch 12 years ago |

I like the name. :)

enigmabomb 12 years ago | |

That doesn't surprise me. You've got good taste.

jhairehmyah 12 years ago |

Looks like a much needed service.

enigmabomb 12 years ago | |

When I was doing agency work the thing that disappointed me the most was that we had LARGE clients with BIG budgets who would have SERIOUS downtime for no particular reason. It was so frustrating. This service comes from that frustration.

sc8 12 years ago |

I'll give it a spin.

enigmabomb 12 years ago | |

Let me know if you have any questions. Josh@Killswit.ch