Hello Haveaclues! It’s me, Barry Hott!

I just uncovered a broken website redirect bug that caused my client to lose $25k in revenue so far this month and I wanted to share that story with you.

BUT, before I share that, I want to welcome you to my VERY FIRST newsletter! 🎉 Thanks for subscribing! I’m very excited and kiiinda overwhelmed to start this.

I hope you make it to the end of the email (don’t just skip ahead), I have something for you down there.

Or if you don’t make it down there, please just reply to this email now and say something, anything, for example: “omg congrats on finally launching the newsletter, what took you so long?” or “Barry, this newsletter was way too long”.

If you want to encourage me to do more emails in the future, you can buy me a drink. Yes, that’s really a thing I built on my website and yes, people I don’t know randomly send me money, and yes, I do use that money to buy drinks.

While today’s newsletter isn’t about making ugly ads, if you’re struggling to make high performing (ugly) ads, please reply to this email with “ugly ads” and we can see how I or the team at Adcrate.co can get your performance heading in the right direction 📈

You may have noticed up above that I called you “Haveaclues” and wondered “what did you just call me, Barry?” Welp, that’s what I’m calling you, people who have a clue about ads, marketing, growth, agencies, performance, DTC, CRO, UGC, and any other abbreviation or anything else you’re here to read about from me.

Are you ready for a short and cute story?

When I was a young Barry, my baseball-loving dad would gather me and a bunch of my friends every weekend at Allenwood park and teach us everything we needed to know about the game of baseball and let us have some fun. He called us “Haveaclues” because we were the kids who had a clue about baseball.

Much like my dad shared with me and my friends everything he knew about baseball with the goal of us becoming better ballplayers and having fun, I’m going to share with y’all everything I know about baseball and teach you how to have fun playing baseball.

Wait. No, not baseball.

I mean marketing and business stuff.

If you’re reading this, you know what I like to talk about. I’m going to tell you stories and tips from my last 15-20 years of advertising. (Did you know I ran my own crappy link exchange when I was like 14?)

Haveaclues is just a newsletter for now, but I hope/plan to expand Haveaclues to be a broader community, brand, and empire. We’ll see!

Earlier in the month I flagged that performance dipped, seemingly related to a site issue, but I couldn't identify the root cause then. When I flagged it, I was told "nothing changed" so I moved on, assuming performance was just naturally down.

Today while still seeing performance was below where I expected it to be, I dug deeper and found several previously great ads were driving to 404 pages and some other were driving to completely dead links.

I can now see how it was only impacting a handful of old ads that were running to very old links, so it would’ve been hard for me to catch early on. Meta shifted budget away from these ads over the past few weeks, and since performance was down, we pulled back budgets.

The issue was due to site redirect changes. The old ads were driving to old links and those old links were dependent on some old redirects. The redirects were axed as part of some other website improvement initiative without realizing the impact they had on our ads.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t flagged to me or my main client contact, so there was no way we could know to look for it. The links are fixed now, but the damage has already been done:

We had spent about $10k going to ads that were driving to broken links this month, but the bigger issue is that some of our top performing ads were now getting no delivery. Ads that we were spending $1,500+/day on were now getting $150/day. This performance of those ads impacted the entire account as lower performing ads started to get more spend and we had to decrease our overall spend.

All said and done, they’ve lost $25k in revenue so far, and it’s going to take weeks for the old ads to get back up to speed now that the redirects have been repaired, with the total revenue lost likely around ~$50k.

Over my career, I've seen millions of dollars go down the drain due to "nothing changed" like this when something actually changed.

I've lost clients due to performance shifts that were only later found out to be due to something that changed, when we were repeatedly assured "nothing changed".

There are very rarely times where performance changes noticeably without it relating to a change. Be careful with your website changes.

If you're reading this, please make sure whoever runs your ads is aware of and has access to a log of alllll changes made to the site, domains, or anything else that can affect any traffic as it can really help investigate and solve issues like this before they get out of control.

I hope you found this useful, I’ll be planning on sending this weekly from now on!

Did you know I made the most comprehensive Facebook ad account audit template the world has ever seen? Welp, I did. It’s based on my 15 years of advertising on Facebook and my reviewing of billions of dollars of ad performance and you can have it. Use code “HAVEACLUES100” to take $100 off my audit template doc this month. This is the first time I’ve offered a discount on it and that $100 is more than 50% off!

If you were hoping for something else, reply and let me know what you’d like from me.

Thank you for reading this!

And now to sign off with my world famous email signature:

Hott regards,
Barry Hott