The Power Of QA: How Not to Ruin Your Campaign…Or Your Day by Jonathan Kagan emphasizes the importance of quality assurance (QA) checks in preventing campaign disasters and ensuring successful search marketing campaigns.
Kagan shares his experiences from the past two decades in digital marketing, highlighting the evolution of platforms and the increasing need for pre- and post-launch QA checks. He notes that some operations still fail to perform these checks, leading to mistakes that competitors can exploit.
Kagan shares some notable mistakes he's encountered:
- In 2011, a major search engine's reps mishandled a campaign for a credit card company, leading to a $150,000 credit back to the company.
- In 2019, a sports nutrition brand's YouTube campaign, which lacked content and age targeting, wasted $500,000 on ads shown primarily to children.
- In 2024, Darden Foods failed to correct a simple mistake in their dynamic location insertion for Olive Garden's search ad.
Kagan also warns of easily overlooked future mistakes, such as default settings in Google Adwords, Bing Ads, and Facebook/Instagram that advertisers must proactively change.
To prevent such mistakes, Kagan suggests a three-phase QA plan:
- Pre-launch: A standardized checklist for all settings to ensure elements are set before launch.
- Post-launch: Similar to the pre-launch list, but includes analysis of initial data to look for anything out of place. This should be done between 24 and 72 hours of launch.
- Ongoing: An ongoing post-launch checklist that is repeated monthly. This isn't a formal optimization document or analysis but an ongoing settings check.
Kagan concludes by emphasizing the importance of an ongoing checklist for the life of a campaign, which can prevent costly mistakes and is part of any solid optimization strategy.
