<b>Case #008: The campaign we killed by accident</b>

<b>Case #008: The campaign we killed by accident</b>

A confession dressed as a post-mortem. We killed a profitable campaign because we read the attribution window wrong, and it took two weeks to understand we'd murdered a winner.

The platform reported conversions on a 7-day-click window. The advertiser paid on last-click within 24 hours. Two different definitions of the same word, and we anchored to the platform's optimistic one.

— Platform-reported ROI: 47%
— We scaled aggressively on that number
— Advertiser-paid ROI: 11%

The 36-point gap was conversions the platform credited to our ad that the advertiser attributed to someone else's last touch. We were buying assists and getting paid for goals. On the inflated number we scaled to $500/day. On the real number, that spend level pushed us underwater because the marginal traffic converted even worse.

The accidental kill came when we panicked at the advertiser's low payout, assumed the offer was broken, and shut everything. But a smaller, tighter version of that campaign — retargeting only, where last-click attribution actually favored us — had been quietly running at 90% ROI inside the chaos. We killed it with everything else.

— What we lost by killing the retargeting set: roughly $1,400/month in clean profit

We only found it reconstructing the wreck two weeks later.

The lesson: your platform and your advertiser may define "conversion" differently — reconcile attribution windows first, or you'll scale on the wrong number and execute your winners alongside your losers.