We learned a very valuable lesson over here today and this small mistake really made things hell.   If you aren’t going direct with your media buying placements then this is stuff you don’t have to worry about.  However, on this wonderful first day of the month we made this mistake and missed out on about $3,000 profit for this particular campaign just for today.   So technically it really didn’t cost us since we didn’t lose but something so simple is easily managable if you just get your ducks in a row ahead of time.

Basically when you go direct with a media buying source you have to have an IO contract to get things rolling. IO stands for insertion order and it involves both parties signing an agreement about the details of your campaign.  Your flight dates, your CPM, your campaign, financial information, and etc. is on this form. After your flight dates are up, then you have to start all over and do another IO for different dates that you’d like to run your campaign during.  Well, we waited until the reminders on our Zedo server told us that it was expiring before we contacted our source to renew it and due to ” new procedures” on their end, our campaign was not able to go up today.  It was approved, papers faxed back within the hour and everything but the red tape on their end took half a day yesterday and then the full day today.

I’m not blaming them at all, they are a great company.  If you think about it, why wouldn’t they want to push this IO as soon as possible?  We have been buying this inventory for a couple of months now and it’s highly unlikely that they would have sold it since we have such a good relationship so they are probably losing out on profits too!  (That’s the power of having good relationships with people you work with, you get priority sometimes!) In fact, we calculated that they lost around $6,000 revenue just because we were late.  It was completely our fault and really learned our lesson the hard way…

Moral of the story, folks, set your reminders to renew IO’s ahead of time if you know you are going to buy the traffic again.  Sure, you don’t want to sign one too early and be locked into a source that you thought was going to back out but ended up tanking.  If that did ever happen, a simple out clause will ensure your safety.  We really are preaching to just give yourself and your source a couple of days to ensure everything will go by smoothly or else both of you could be missing out on money! (Hopefully not as much as we did either…)