Horror stories

An intern joined our marketing team and changes the names of our pages. In our CMS the names of the pages are connected to the URL slug so the URLs of these pages changed (without a redirect). Couple of weeks and thousands pounds later we discovered this change.

We had prepared for this massive campaign where we would spend £200k in a few hours via our biddable channels. Being a brand in the gambling industry we have country related filters which broke down, blocking users from our target country accessing the landing pages.

The web development agency of one of our largest clients rolled out a regular update to their site, but while doing that they forgot to uncomment the GTM tag. For more a week we had no pixels firing - no Google Analytics, no Facebook pixel, no nothing. Creating the monthly report and then preparing for the QBR was a nightmare. The worst thing about this is that it can happen to any of our clients at any point. We don't get told when a new code is pushed live and we don't have the bandwidth to check it all.

Our products are spread across multiple sub-domains each of which have their own SSL certificate. Someone made an error in the configuration making the certificate invalid. For more than a day the sub-domain was not accessible by users. Our channel performance metrics went down due to no conversions.

Our website is built heavily on JavaScript. We have issues with the code being inefficient, but one of the updates pushed it to a new level. Our load time increased by more than 4 seconds. As you would expect our conversion dropped by 60%. My team spent hours trying to figure out what has happened, but with no success. Only by accident through a conversation with the SEO team we learned about the increase in load time. If not for this serendipity, we would have spent so much time trying to find an error in our bidding strategy.

Our client was going through a re-branding exercise. New domain, new CMS and all. We were ready to change the landing pages. What we were not told is that 2 weeks before the planned launch of the new brand, client decided to do a soft-launch by switching on the new site and switching off the old one. No redirects. Took us couple of days to notice it. SEO teams wasn't very happy either.

One day we noticed that our biggest client had a drop of conversion rate. The team tried to understand what has happened and rectify the issue, but couldn't. We went on our monthly performance call with a few weak explanations since we had to say something. As we were laying it out, the client mentioned that it could be related to the changes of main images. Turns out that due to changes in one of their partnerships they could no longer use certain imaginary so for time being they replaced all landing page images with a default placeholder.

During my regular account checkup I noticed a drop in the conversion rate for my main client. I checked Google Ads platform and a few of the landing pages - everything seemed fine. The traffic numbers were the same so it must be connected with the landing pages. I spoke to their development team and the conversion pixels were firing. In our monthly interagency call their analytics team presented the results of their conversion rate optimisation test. It all made sense now. Shame for the the many hours wasted on trying to pinpoint the issue.