Almost lost $12k on a programmatic buy because of a single pixel

I was running a display campaign out of a coffee shop in Austin last month and accidentally duplicated a conversion pixel that ate up my entire budget in 3 hours. Has anyone else had a small tech slip up burn through their ad spend like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

cora_scott7713d ago

$12k in 3 hours is brutal man, I had a campaign launch where I forgot to put a frequency cap on a display buy and one user saw my ad literally 847 times in a single day. Burned through $4,800 before the system caught it and I could kill the line item. Makes you want to triple check every single setting before hitting launch.

gracewebb23d ago

oh man i heard a story just like this from my friend sarah who works in media buying in dallas. she was running a big campaign for a home renovation brand and accidentally checked the wrong box in her DSP that made it target "everyone in the US" instead of just texas. burned through 15k in like two hours while she was in a meeting. she said she felt sick to her stomach when she saw the billing dashboard. its scary how one little slip can cost you weeks of work right?

morgan.logan23d ago

The "felt sick to my stomach" part is way too real. I had a buddy who worked at a small ad agency and he did almost the exact same thing but with a retargeting campaign that was supposed to be capped at like $100 a day. He put in the wrong budget number and it was supposed to be $100 but he typed $10,000 by accident. Spent the whole monthly budget in maybe 45 minutes. The client called freaking out because they saw a huge spike in traffic but it was all bots and random people who had zero interest in their product.