When SEO edits cost RUB 24,000. and how to avoid it

An acquaintance of mine told a funny and instructive story that can happen to anyone who does advertising on search engines.

“AAAAAAAAA, are you crazy?” — this is how my Friday morning began. A client called and began to indignantly ask why the ad failure rate had increased by more than 60% in a week.

I took statistics twice a week, and at that time the next measurement was supposed to be on Friday, but I didn’t have time. In a panic, I stopped all the advertising and took a break to think and understand what was happening.

What happened?

At the beginning of the week everything was fine if you look at the statistics by day. But on Wednesday and Thursday, the failure rate jumped to 95%. I decided to look at which campaigns and pages these spikes were coming from. One thing is clear: with a 95% failure rate, all advertising becomes useless.

I visited the page using a link from an ad and encountered a 404 error. It became clear that the error was related to changes made by the SEO contractor. They changed the URL on almost all directory pages (for example, it was /tryba, it became /truba). Of course, from an SEO perspective, this may be the right move. The contractor even set up redirects from old URLs to new ones, but did not take into account one important point - the advertising links contain UTM tags and other parameters that were not taken into account during the redirect. As a result, when following these links, users ended up on a 404 page. Thus, for two days advertising simply burned through the budget, and only 5% of users who manually corrected the link went to the site.

What we tried to do

We tried to return the money spent for ineffective clicks in advertising systems. We contacted support, pointing out that the “Disable advertising when the site is down” checkbox was activated in Yandex, and that Direct and Metrica were linked. However, support reported that in fact the site was working, and the only ones that were not working were the pages to which advertising links led. They considered this our problem.

Google support stated that their robots check pages twice a day and if the landing page is not available, the ads should be paused. Why this did not happen has never been clarified. They forwarded the request to the technical department, but at that moment Google support began to change and our request was lost. For another three months we tried to get at least some answer, but all in vain.

Unfortunately, we learned late that you can file a complaint about ineffective clicks. When we filed a complaint, we were denied a refund for the clicks because too much time had passed. If you encounter this situation, please fill out the Invalid Clicks Complaint form.

What have we done

Since we could not influence the SEO contractor and they did not want to coordinate changes with us (and were not obliged to), we took the following steps:

• Replaced all links with current ones.
• We asked the contractor to set up redirects taking into account advertising campaigns.
• We conducted an analysis with our managers so that a similar situation would not repeat within the same company.

How to avoid it

• Set up notifications in analytics systems so that if the bounce rate is more than 40%, you will immediately receive an email.
• Use scripts to monitor 404 errors. There is a ready-made solution for Google, but for Yandex you will have to write your own script, but you can use the proposed software.
• Inform those in charge (account managers or marketers) that any changes to the site may affect contextual advertising. This is especially true for major changes, such as changing page URLs or domains. Such changes must be notified in advance.

If you have any questions about SEO or need advice, you can write to the SEO studio "SEO COMPUTER" by email info@seo.computer.

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