Monitoring destination URLs
If your subscription plan supports it, Terminus can monitor the URLs in your account to help you keep track of any broken pages in your marketing campaigns and fix them if necessary.
1. Enable URL monitoring
This feature is enabled by default. In case you have turned it off, you can enable it by following these steps.
Navigate to your project Settings and then Advanced Settings.
Check Monitor destination URLs and Save.
This will enable URL monitoring for the project. There’s nothing else you need to do. The rest of the steps are for more details about this feature.
2. How URL monitoring works in Terminus
If URL monitoring is enabled, Terminus checks each destination URL once per day to see if it’s reachable. When making a request, Terminus servers identify themselves in the User-Agent HTTP header as
Terminus URL Monitoring Bot (+https://www.terminusapp.com)
Based on the response received from the website, the URL is either marked as “reachable” or “not reachable”.
When a URL is reachable, it’s shown with a green checkmark as
When a URL is NOT reachable, it’s shown with a red cross as
When you hover over the red cross, it shows the most likely reason (if available) it was not reachable.
3. Search for broken URLs in your project
You can search for all the broken URLs in your project by going to the URLs tab and using the Advanced Search feature.
Select In Error in the Destination Page Status section and click Search. You’ll see all the URLs that are currently marked as broken.
4. Broken URLs email report
If enabled, you will get an email (once per week) about all the broken URLs in your account for each project. You can use these to keep track of any URLs that might have stopped working, either for new or old campaigns, and see if they need fixing.
5. My URL is working fine, but it is flagged as broken
Even though we try our best to make sure that URLs are correctly identified as reachable, the process is not always reliable due to a variety of reasons.
- The most likely scenario is that the destination website has blocked the requests from Terminus servers. This happens because the website server has identified Terminus servers as a bot and refused to respond correctly.
- When Terminus last checked the URL, there was a temporary error on the destination website and as a result, it was marked as not reachable. Since each URL is checked once per day, the email report about broken URLs may be sent before the next scheduled check.
- If the URL points to a file format that’s not easily identifiable by Terminus servers, those URLs can also be marked as not reachable. To prevent such cases, it’s a best practice to have the file extension be part of the URL. For example, a PDF file should have a URL of the form
https://www.example.com/whitepaper.pdfand NOThttps://www.example.com/whitepaper
6. Disable URL monitoring
Even though URL monitoring is supposed to be a useful feature that complements your UTM tracking efforts, it may sometimes cause unnecessary alarms when it doesn’t work as expected. In those cases, you may decide to disable it at one of these various levels.
a. Disable URL monitoring for a specific URL
If there are a few specific URLs that are being incorrectly monitored, you can disable monitoring by editing them in the URLs section (click the pencil icon on the far right).
Check Don’t monitor URLs and Save.
b. Disable email report for yourself
Use this option if you don’t want to get the Broken URLs email reports, but want to leave the rest of URL monitoring as is. Go to My profile section in your account.
Select Never for Notify me about broken URLs and Save.
c. Disable email report for all users in your account
Use this option if you want to disable Broken URLs email reports for all the users in your account, but would like to continue monitoring the URLs. Only people with administrator privileges can change this.
Go to Account Settings in your account.
Uncheck the broken URLs notice checkbox and Save
d. Disable URL monitoring
All of the above options will retain URL monitoring while only disabling email notices or disabling monitoring for specific URLs. To disable URL monitoring completely you can navigate to each project's Settings and Advanced Settings.
Uncheck Monitor destination URLs and Save.