My lucky day (26)
I just noticed i had a campaign on $250 CPM for a few hours, another great day... 
btw not revenue, my bid was $250 by mistake.
lol holy shit. damn dude.
how much did you burn? how was your return..?
IIRC, ero-advertising warns you if you accidentally put on a ridiculous bid
Luckily it was a small campaign and it had a small budget. Nonetheless, a few hundred down the drain is a shame.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever done the same and got a part of the money back from the traffic source?
My old trading manager told me he bit into a burrito once and the filling fell out and hit his button and cost him 3k. I laughed. He didn't.
Shit happens.
I lost a 4 figures overnight a few months ago because I forgot to switch off the cloaker settings. What did I do?
a) implement a gameplan so the mistake doesn't happen again. For these types of campaigns I now have a checklist that I make sure to follow.
b) I forgot about it a few minutes later and carried on.
These tiny mistakes are part of the learning process
^^ I know that exact feeling when I used to use NIF, happened to me a few times - lost about a grand and it wasn't fun.
My cloaker has an optional feature that starts campaigns at a certain time (setting localtime with PHP to be the FB account timezone, so the times match up), and it's always midnight when I schedule my camps to start (FB...) so there's no worry there, I leave it set to 00:00. Ads always get approved within 1-2 hours of submitting them and I check for approval emails on the phone to make sure... then there are some hours left before the campaign starts.
We've also debated doing some imap/mail checking that sees if you've received all the approved/denied emails from your traffic source (if using FB for example) before setting cloaker to 'active'... but that's going a little too far and it's cumbersome. Right now we check all traffic on a weekly basis (have checked/updated rules daily for the last few months) and the amount of optimisation to the cloaker needed is not much at all, we're just working on features instead.
Therefore I don't believe any cloaker with pause/start technology is all that good, it's not required anymore IMO if the rules are well adjusted from months of learning... and in fact it leaves you open to a massive discrepancy in 'bad' IPs, because some affiliates will erroneously (as Charles did) leave the cloaker set to review mode and the visits could get flagged for other affiliates.
Back to the topic though: yes, losing money on errors sucks, but it will harden you! I lost a bit of money TWICE now on MySQL fuckups on the server, and incorrect URLs etc. Right now whenever I am in FB on the accounts or in my tracking, I am super alert with hawk eyes! 
Originally Posted by reflex
Not me.
Also, regarding the CPM, talk to them. If it is a blatant error on your part and they charged at that CPM, rather than in a Vickrey style auction where you beat the 2nd bidder, they might just be compassionate. If you would have won that much traffic at $25 CPM then there's little point in them laughing off your loss of money if it loses them future business.
A checklist is a must! Especially when you're dealing with employees:
My business partner once lost $230k in 4 hours when an employee set the CPM to 0.60 instead of 0.06, forgot to set a daily budget and went to bed.
He spent the next whole week reaching out to all partners involved and managed to get $140k in refunds. It never hurts to ask 
The employee was let go - not because of her mistake, but because she kept coming up with silly excuses.
It's all stuff that happens.
I burned 4 figures not too long ago copy / pasting the url of my lander from the browser to the tracker. Too bad it didn't include http and all traffic went to a broken link :P
Originally Posted by lifetweak
My business partner once lost $230k in 4 hours when an employee set the CPM to 0.60 instead of 0.06, forgot to set a daily budget and went to bed.
He spent the next whole week reaching out to all partners involved and managed to get $140k in refunds. It never hurts to ask
The employee was let go - not because of her mistake, but because she kept coming up with silly excuses.
Employee bid 1 dollar instead of 1 cent .. we spent 600 in 4 minutes.. she covered half to show shes sorry and worked hard to use the data she got us to make back the loss and then some
Originally Posted by bbrock32
Originally Posted by bbrock32
As for the CPM error, this has happened to me on some sources that don't notify you if setting too high of a CPM (like most sources).
The last one was on AdBucks, I bid 250 dollars CPM instead of 0.250... a few hundreds went away in a few mins before I realized.
If this was to happen on Exoclick, it would be different because the SmartCPM would just bid high enough to bid the top competitor, but AdBucks doesnt work like that
Originally Posted by cosmeivan
Happened to me too, I bid 80 cents per click instead of 8, 100 bucks lost within a few minutes, emailed the traffic source - trafficfactory - just out of curiosity if they will be willing to refund, they didnt even bother replying. Few days later, they added max bid limits
$230k loss in 4 hours!!!? I thought some of my fat finger mistakes were bad...gawd damn.
I set up a campaign targeting France on TrafficForce this week.
For country targeting, they have two boxes. Allowed countries and forbidden countries.
I dragged France in to forbidden, and the rest of the world in to allowed countries.
Thankfully, TF didn't approve it:
Merci, TF!
Saved me a few shillings, me thinketh.
Just had a refund, i paid the top CPM price on that spot and got about 99% refunded 
Originally Posted by panicore
Originally Posted by bbrock32
Originally Posted by panicore
This is one more reason to invest some time into getting to know your reps at traffic sources. If you're not just another faceless customer, it's way more likely for them to give you refunds and other good stuff
Something that happened to me recently: I started a new managed buy on Thursday right before the easter weekend, meaning from Fri-Mon I wouldn't be able to reach anybody from the traffic source.
The campaign performed terrible, worse than -50% ROI, I had some screwed up dashboard access that wouldn't even let me stop the campaigns myself and the budget was set to uncapped by mistake.
Funny feeling watching your campaign bleeding money at a decent clip for a couple days without being able to do anything about it lol.
I discussed it with my rep once he was back at the office and after a couple days I got a 100 % refund for the whole campaign, so I actually ended up making a couple k out of the whole situation
Man losing $230k in a few hours would be pretty numbing lol I don't really know how I would feel LOL
Definitely had my fair share of slip ups, making them forces you to always go back over and dont be lazy
After this I'll tell you, I don't feel like leaving campaigns running while I'm sleeping. I told this on my follow along thread. Some weeks ago I started a Campaign on Exoclick targeting Germany. It was supposed to pick only 1 premium spot, but I left it actually RON. Sudenly the traffic started coming, and in minutes reached the daily budget of $ 50, but it didn't stoped. This way I spent $ 93 testing 5 banners, made $ 17 back. It's not a lot to lose but I'd prefer "losing" that money on data that will be useful for the campaign. I just discovered this mistake a few days ago, then I decided to give this campaign another try in the premium placement. And I'm updating it on my follow along
@andyvon - I had that happen to me a little while ago on FB - started running a campaign, did something non-standard on the dashboard, got locked out of the campaign for 5 days whilst it sat there bleeding money. It was an absolutely godawful campaign, too. Fortunately I did have a cap on daily spend, but it was still a non-fun experience
Originally Posted by caurmen
My FB news feed was broken for over 2 weeks recently... FBs servers were delivering my browser a broken page. Everything else worked fine thankfully - and it happened in all browsers, different connections, different computers at different physical locations. It was linked to my account as the NF was fine when I logged into another. Weird. Glad it fixed though!
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