I'm building an ad URL monitor for e-commerce stores — here's what I learned from burning my own ad budget
I run a small e-commerce store and for a while I couldn't figure out why my Google Ads ROAS kept dropping. Turned out I was sending paid traffic to product pages that had gone out of stock weeks earlier. Nobody told me. The ads just kept running.
That was expensive enough that I decided to build the tool I wish I'd had. AdPuffin monitors your ad destination URLs and alerts you when a page breaks, a product goes out of stock, or a price changes — before you waste more budget.
Today is day 2. Zero customers, zero revenue, just a landing page at adpuffin.com and a waitlist. Targeting solo e-commerce owners who run paid ads on Google/Meta/TikTok and are tired of finding out about broken pages from angry customers instead of from an alert.
Happy to answer any questions about the problem space or what I've built. Would love to hear if anyone else has run into this.
The nice thing here is that this is not really an ad tool first. It is a waste-prevention tool.
That feels important because it changes the buyer psychology. You are not pitching “better marketing,” you are pitching “stop leaking money from campaigns you already paid for.”
That blind spot where you're burning budget on a dead page for weeks and nothing flags it. We keep running into the same pattern from a different angle.
We scan Shopify stores for health issues (ghost billing, app bloat, broken links) and the reaction is always the same: "wait, that's been going on for HOW long?"
The ad URL side is a gap nobody plugs. Day 2 and you already know the exact pain because you lived it. That's the strongest starting point.
How are you planning to handle stores with high SKU turnover where stock changes multiple times a day?
Great question. For high SKU turnover stores, the plan is hourly checks — which catches most stock changes within a reasonable window. If a product goes OOS at 2pm, you'd know by 3pm at the latest instead of finding out days later from a tanked ROAS report.
For stores where stock changes multiple times a day, there's a case for webhook-based monitoring (getting notified by the platform directly when inventory hits zero) but that's a v2 thing. For now, hourly polling covers 90%+ of the pain.
Hourly checks covering 90%+ of the pain makes sense for v1. Ship that, get real usage data, then let the merchants who need webhook-level speed tell you they need it. Don't build v2 before v1 has paying users.
Good luck with the build.
Hey — this is a painfully real problem. Losing ad spend on dead or out-of-stock pages happens more often than people admit.
The alerting angle is solid, especially if it’s fast enough to catch issues before spend stacks up.
Curious, are you planning to integrate directly with ad platforms (to auto-pause ads), or keep it as an alert-only layer for now?
Also — I’m running a small experiment with ecom/infra builders working on problems like this.
$19 entry, winner gets a Tokyo trip (flights + hotel). Round 01 is live (100 cap).
For now it's alert-only — email and dashboard. The ad platform integration (auto-pause) is the dream but it requires API review from Google and Meta which is a whole process. Alert-only already solves the core problem though: knowing about it fast enough to act manually. Cool experiment with the Tokyo trip — good luck with Round 01.
Yeah that makes sense — alert-only already solves the main problem if people find out fast enough.
Auto-pause can come later once you have more users.
Appreciate it — and if you ever want help with distribution or feedback, happy to help 👍