You send a campaign to 40,000 subscribers. The link in the footer points to a product page that was quietly archived two weeks ago — nobody set a redirect, nobody checked. The clicks land on a 404. By the time someone spots it in the performance data, you've burned a solid chunk of your send budget on traffic that went nowhere.
That's the clearest argument for link health monitoring. But dead destinations are only one failure mode.
SSL certificates expire. Servers go down at 2am on a Saturday. Pages move without forwarding rules in place. Third-party landing pages get restructured by an agency that wasn't thinking about your URLs. A link that worked perfectly during QA can quietly rot over weeks — and if you're not watching it, you'll hear about it from a frustrated user long before you see it in a dashboard.
Acturity's automated link health monitoring runs continuous checks on your destinations so you're not dependent on someone noticing something looks off.
The Three Ways a Link Dies
Most people picture a 404 when they hear "broken link." That's too narrow.
Dead destinations are the obvious one — the URL returns a 4xx or 5xx error because the page was deleted, the server fell over, or the site got restructured without anyone thinking about existing paths. Easy to understand, annoying to catch if you're not watching.
SSL failures are sneakier. The cert expired, the domain changed, the CDN cached a stale cert longer than expected. Whatever the cause, visitors hit a full-browser warning that says "Your connection is not private." Around 95% close the tab immediately. Your link is technically live. It's just completely useless.
Then there are redirect chains. Technically the URL resolves — just through four or five hops, some of which may loop, some of which may land somewhere unintended. These quietly destroy page speed and wreck attribution data.
And honestly — response time. A destination that takes 11 seconds to load isn't broken in the traditional sense, but on a mobile connection, it might as well be. Users don't wait. They leave, and you never hear why.
SSL Failures Nobody Sees Coming
SSL is one of those things teams assume is handled. Auto-renewal is configured, the cert manager runs on schedule, everything is fine. Except when it isn't.
Auto-renewal fails more often than people expect. A DNS change misconfigures the validation check. A domain transfer introduces a gap in the cert chain. A CDN serves a cached cert past its expiry because the invalidation didn't propagate. In each case, the cert lapses and nobody on your team gets a calendar reminder — the assumption was that it would just work.
This gets particularly rough for QR codes tied to physical campaigns — print, packaging, retail signage. You can't push a software update to a sticker on a shelf. If the destination's SSL fails two months after your campaign launch, those QR scans stop working silently while the physical material is still out there being scanned.
SSL monitoring isn't just "check that a cert exists." It means checking expiry dates and alerting 30-plus days before, validating the full chain, and confirming the domain matches. A cert that's technically valid but issued to the wrong domain still throws a full browser warning. That distinction matters.
Checking Once vs. Watching Always
On-demand scanning — run a tool, get a CSV, fix the issues — works fine for a static site with a few hundred internal pages you control.
It doesn't work for short links pointing outside your domain. Third-party landing pages, affiliate destinations, partner microsites. You have no say over when those change. Partners update their site structure. Campaigns expire. Agencies rebuild pages without thinking about existing URLs that are still live in emails you sent six months ago.
The real difference between scanning and monitoring is the schedule. Keeping tabs on your link performance data is more valuable when it's continuous — because the failure you care about didn't happen when you last ran a report. It happened Wednesday afternoon, while your paid ads were still running.
Monitoring means checks run on an interval — every 15 minutes, every hour — and you get alerted the moment something breaks. Not when someone notices CTR dropped. Not when a customer emails in. Immediately.
What Acturity's Link Health Checks Do — Under the Hood
Each check follows the full redirect chain to the final destination. Not the short link layer — all the way through to the page your user would actually land on.
At that final URL, we check:
- HTTP status code and whether it falls in an expected range
- SSL certificate validity, expiry date, and full chain
- Response time, tracked over multiple checks so you can see degradation before it becomes a hard failure
- Significant content changes at the destination — useful for detecting pages that technically load but now display an error message or expired-offer placeholder
When a link transitions from healthy to unhealthy, the alert goes out immediately. Not in a digest. The moment the state changes. Every hour a broken link sits live in an active campaign is paid traffic or email clicks hitting a wall.
You can also see health status in the real-time analytics dashboard alongside click data. If a link is receiving active traffic and the destination is returning 503s, both facts are visible in one place — you don't need to cross-reference tools to understand what's happening.
When an Alert Fires
First: check whether the failure is sustained or a blip. Servers hiccup. A 30-second outage that resolved itself is different from a destination that's been returning errors for two hours. The check history will show you which.
If it's sustained, two paths forward:
- Redirect to a fallback page while the original destination gets fixed
- Deactivate the link with a custom landing page if there's no usable fallback right now
Either way, the health alert gives you the head start. You find out minutes after the failure — not days later when someone notices the CTR tanked.
Wiring Health Alerts Into Your Team's Workflow
Nobody wants to log into a dashboard to find out something's broken.
The more practical setup is routing health alerts automatically to the right channels. Acturity fires webhook events when a link's health status changes — healthy to down, healthy to SSL-expiring-soon, degraded response time crossing a threshold. Route those to Slack, trigger a Zapier workflow, ping an on-call rotation. The payload includes the link ID, destination URL, failure type, and timestamps — everything needed to triage without logging in first.
Worth thinking through before you set up the routing: alerts need to reach the right person, not just a shared channel that everyone half-watches. If one person owns the email campaign and another owns the paid ads, health alerts for their links should land in front of them specifically. That's a configuration problem, but it's worth solving once rather than discovering the routing is wrong during an actual incident.
FAQ
How often do health checks run?
Check frequency is configurable at the account level or per link. Most teams run checks every 15 to 30 minutes for active campaign links and hourly for evergreen content. For links inside live paid campaigns, every five minutes is reasonable — the cost of a missed failure is high enough to justify the check frequency.
Does monitoring cover links I haven't touched recently?
By default, all non-archived links stay monitored. Old links sometimes receive unexpected traffic when content gets republished or syndicated, so it's generally better to leave monitoring on rather than assume a link is dormant. You can exclude specific links manually if needed.
Can I trigger a check outside the schedule?
Yes — from the dashboard or via the API, you can run an on-demand health check against any link. Useful before a campaign goes live, or immediately after you've updated a destination and want to confirm the fix took effect.
Your links aren't static. Destinations change, certs expire, servers go down at inconvenient times. And your audience doesn't distinguish between "the link was broken" and "this company sent me something broken" — it all lands the same way.
Setting up link health monitoring takes about ten minutes. Finding out a campaign link broke two minutes after it failed instead of two days later is the part that makes it worth it.
