Broken Links Alert

Request every URL the account advertises and report the ones that do not come back healthy.

A landing page that stops responding does not stop your ads. Google keeps serving them, you keep paying for the clicks and the visitor lands on an error. This automation collects every URL your account points at, requests each one and reports the ones that do not come back healthy.

It is a reporting automation. It never changes your account, so it is safe to activate on a daily schedule and forget about.

What it collects

Each run gathers URLs from three places, each of which you can turn off:

• Ad URLs are the final URLs and final mobile URLs on your ads.
• Keyword URLs are the final URLs set on individual keywords. A keyword URL overrides the ad URL, so a broken one is invisible if you only check ads.
• Sitelink URLs are the destinations behind your sitelink assets.

Every URL is requested once per run, no matter how many ads or keywords share it. By default only enabled ads in enabled ad groups in enabled campaigns are collected, because a paused URL cannot cost you a click.

How a URL is judged

Flowboost requests the URL and follows redirects, up to five hops, to wherever they end. The status code at the end of that chain is what gets compared against Healthy HTTP codes. Anything not on that list is reported, along with the campaign, ad group, ad, keyword or sitelink it came from.

Only 200 is healthy by default. A URL that answers 301 and then 200 is healthy, because the code recorded is the one at the end of the redirect.

A run also reports when a request failed outright rather than returning a code, for example a domain that no longer resolves or a server that never answered.

Settings

Filters holds the three URL sources, whether paused entities are included, and Ignored domains.

Ignored domains is a comma separated list of hosts that are never requested. Matching includes subdomains, so example.com also skips shop.example.com. Use it for hosts that treat an automated request as a bot and answer with an error that means nothing about the page.

Criteria holds Healthy HTTP codes, picked from a dropdown. Most accounts never change it.

Selecting a code silences it. Everything on the list is treated as a working page, so the way to hear about a status is to leave it unselected.

Three of the options are worth knowing about:

• Redirect codes (301, 302, 303, 307, 308) are best left unselected. A redirect that ends at a working page already reports as 200, because the code recorded is the one at the end of the chain. A bare 3xx reaches the report only when the redirect is broken: an empty Location header, or a chain longer than five hops. Selecting these codes hides exactly those failures.
• 403 Forbidden and 429 Too Many Requests are the two codes a healthy page most often returns to an automated request. Select them to stop hearing about it when the refusals are spread across hosts. When it is one host doing it, Ignored domains is the better answer, because it stops the request instead of accepting a meaningless answer to it.
• 404 is deliberately not offered. There is no version of a missing page that is healthy.

When it emails you

You get an alert when a run finds at least one URL that is not healthy, and only when there is something new compared to the last alert Flowboost sent in the past seven days. New means a URL and status code pair that was not in the previous alert, so the same broken page does not mail you every morning, while the same page failing in a new way does.

Reading a run

Open Status updates in the automation's row. The report shows how many URLs were checked, how many came back unhealthy, and a row per problem URL with the entity it belongs to so you can find it in Google Ads.

A run also reports whether it finished. Very large accounts can hit the per run URL ceiling, in which case the run reports what it managed to check rather than failing. If you see that regularly, turn off a URL source you do not need so the remaining budget goes further.

Suggested approach

Daily is the right cadence. The cost of a broken landing page is proportional to how long it stays broken, and a daily run means you hear about it within a day.

Fix the alert before you widen the settings. A first run on an account that has never been checked often turns up a long tail of old sitelinks pointing at pages that no longer exist. Clear those out, then leave the automation running to catch the next one.