As you guys prob saw yesterday, our site was down off and on.  Wasn’t a bad thing, had to upgrade the server.  Although the move didn’t go over as smoothly as my techs would have hoped, they finally got everything up and running again today (with just a little encouragement from me).  We hardly ever have server issues but on my checklist before I launch any media buy we check all servers being used for image hosting and landing pages and what not.  Again, the cluster set-up we have is robust enough for even our largest media buys.

I have been testing a new media buy this week and this morning decided it was time to open up the flood gates.  So that’s what I did.  I went through my checklist.  Everything was checked including landing pages and links.  After about an hour I checked stats to see if the conversions on the optimized pages were holding as the traffic increased and found that not only was it holding it was actually up almost 20%.  GRAVY!

So I checked out.  I went onto another project we are in the middle of.  I checked the conversions an hour later (not paying that much attention) and saw that it was still elevated over what it tested at.  I literally checked out.  I left the office for the next few hours taking all the guys with me.  When we got back I thought I wanted to see what type of volume this particular buy was doing since it was a relatively new product (but we have worked with the advertiser for years so we knew they could handle the volume).  When I pulled stats up I noticed something really odd.  The conversion rate was the exact same as when we left and looking at the total sales it was mighty low.  My first thought was the traffic source shut the ad down for some reason so I immediately picked up the phone.  While the phone was ringing I logged in and saw that we were still live and spending money.  WTF?  The last thing that crossed my mind was our servers.

I pulled a link for the ad and it went no where.  It was the same feeling you get when you first get dickrolled on WF.  My account manager picked up while I was figuring this all out and got it paused pretty quickly.  $17,448 is what it cost to take the office out to lunch and beers.  And the food wasn’t even that good.  The life of an affiliate marketer.  At 11 am this morning it was going to be one of the best days this month but without warning it turned out to be hopefully the worst.

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