And It Was All Yellow

What seemed like a tribute to the Coldplay song of the early 2000s or a hope to be back in the sunshine of the summer many sites on Tuesday evening were bombarded with pure yellow ads. In this Adage Article, it was reported that it was a simple mistake that occurred during a Google employee training session. Although the mistake only went unchecked for 45 minutes. It was a multimillion dollar lesson that a Google employee learned the hard way.
A Google spokesperson released the following statement:
“An advertiser training exercise led to an error where actual spend happened on publisher sites for approximately 45 minutes. As soon as we were made aware of this honest mistake we worked quickly to stop the campaigns running. We will honor payments to publishers for any ads purchased and are working hard to put safeguards in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
Oh What A Thing To Do
Unfortunately, many of us have experienced a similar issue to what happened to Google this week. Whether it be sending ads to a landing page that didn’t have the correct tracking thus not receiving the valuable campaign performance data needed to optimize that spend or even worse the landing page wasn’t even live!
No need to hide! During my time working with marketing organizations across the world I have seen these issues happen time and time again. Whether it be on an email with a low impact on reporting to a large scale blunder that affected data for months, wasted precious ad dollars, and the opportunity to increase ROAS.
Turn Into Something Beautiful
Don’t worry there is a way to deal with these problems and eliminate them from your organization! Claravine has built-in functionality that allows your teams to validate and check every single link that is put into production in your organization. Because of the simplicity of checking these links you can use the Claravine platform to publish links for every email, social post (both organic and paid), and other paid media you have running.
Our clients at Claravine have been able to take a mess of broken links and extensive ETL and data cleansing processes and turn their analytics reporting “into something beautiful”. One Claravine client went from less than 50% tracking code tagging efficiency to nearly 100% in the short time it took to implement this new process. For our clients, this increased efficiency is helping teams across the world improve their ROAS and other KPIs and reduce the stress of launching new campaigns across your organization.
“[Draw] a line” for your organization and improve your process, governance, and analytics today. Learn from the mistakes of others and ask for a free demo of the Claravine platform!
So Then I Took My Turn
Do you have a similar story of ads or landing pages going bad? We would love to hear from you!
**If you aren’t sick of all of the Coldplay references in this article. Take a moment and listen to the original version on Spotify.