Is Your Website Ready?

Your Ad Campaign Is Live, But Is The Site Ready?

Nothing irks me more than clicking on an ad only to see some kind of site error. As an Internet marketer, I know that the advertiser just paid for my click or paid for the impression and they just lost an opportunity. It's bad enough when the site is down during an ongoing campaign, but when you have an email blitz the site better be up and ready for the bump in traffic.

This morning I was going through the daily IAB Smartbrief and noticed a familiar logo sponsoring one of the sections. This logo is for a large organization here in Orlando--not one of our clients. Interested in why they would be sponsoring the Smartbrief since the demographic didn't seem to be a direct correlation I clicked the link and saw this:

Uh oh!

The Smartbrief is a daily email blast and typically email campaigns will have an initial spike followed quickly by a trickle. You basically have one chance to capture the visitors and had better plan to do so for about the first 4 hours following the email being sent.

I then saw that they had a whitepaper talking about ROI for business travel. Since we are a holistic Internet marketing company, I like to stay abreast of all forms of ROI for my clients and figured I'd check out the whitepaper. I clicked the link and saw this:

Strike 2!

I'm not going to bother to throw a third pitch. The site is obviously down at a very inopportune time.

Control Your Ads

You have to know which ads are running when so the ads can be paused or site maintenance can be scheduled appropriately. We were doing a site redesign launch for a client last week and, even though we didn't expect any system downtime, we paused all of their ads for about 30 minutes while we checked out the site to make sure everything was functioning. We then used the ad previewing tools to make sure the ads were still going to the proper places and everything was fine before turning the ads back on. It may not seem like much if you are only paying $1.50 per click, but that $1.50 click that was lost could be the $1.50 click that results in a big sale later in the day.