I’ve been burned again.
You figure after doing this line of work for over a decade that I’d learn, but nope.
And I guarantee every single person reading this is going to make the exact same mistake I just made at least once. So if this short little article can help you avoid some frustrations and headaches I’m happy to pass the advice on. And here it is…
Always check your work.
That’s it. It’s not complicated but it will literally save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars and hours of frustration. Why? Because to err is human.
I’ve literally lost count of the number of times I’ve started a new ad campaign, haven’t checked and something was broken but I’ll never forget the first time…
I’m fairly certain it was a holiday sale around eight or nine years ago. I had worked tirelessly for weeks creating a new product, putting together the ad, assembling the campaign and getting everything ready for launch day. For those of you not familiar, a product launch is a very intense few days. Between answering customer support inquiries, making sure everything is working flawlessly and trying to maintain your sanity there’s very little time to actually eat or perform any other human functions.
So to prepare for this monumental product lunch my wife and I decided to go do groceries so that we wouldn’t have to leave the house for a few days. Launches are crazy. And that way we’ll be able to focus on the business.
We were really cutting it down to the last minute. The project was due to go live in the next hour and we had no food at home. So we rushed out thinking everything was set up correctly, that the page would go live and we wouldn’t have any issues. In a perfect world it it should have gone just fine. Sales should have started pouring in. Heck, we would’ve come home probably having our groceries already paid for.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, as affiliates started to promote, I started getting a flurry of panicked messages letting me know that my buy button was not connected! Nobody was able to purchase!
We were literally haemorrhaging thousands of dollars every hour that it wasn’t running.
I left everything we had in our cart and drove home as fast as I could to fix the issue. Talk about a panicked moment!
I’d love to tell you that was the last time that happened, but it would be a lie. Like I said at the beginning of this article you think I’d learn. Nope.
So what prompted me to write this little post today? Well the exact same thing happened just a few days ago. Launched a brand new ad going to a video page using a custom video player. Everything was working flawlessly. I tested it all. No problems.
Except when I started watching the replay videos of customers visiting my page. I noticed something funny. My sales video wasn’t loading and people were leaving the page within seconds! Something wasn’t working.
Thankfully I had installed luckyorange.com and was able to monitor everything. But if I hadn’t of done that I’d be continuing to run these ads to a page that nobody could buy from… Again.
The problem? A little tiny piece of tracking code at the end of Facebook‘s link cause my page to break. There would’ve been absolutely no way to test this without running ads first. But because I didn’t check everything thoroughly enough, I ended up spending about $150 sending traffic to a page that was essentially blank.
Always check your work. 🙂
Ok that’s it for me today. I feel like I should go double check work now. Ha!
Cheers
-Adam
