Every PPC professional has a story they wish they could erase. For Danny Gavin, founder of Optidge, it wasn’t a failed bidding strategy or a campaign that overspent. It was something far simpler—and arguably much more painful.
Danny joined me on PPC Live The Podcast, to talk about the technical issue that meant leads generated through a landing page never reached the client. For one to two months, the campaigns continued delivering qualified prospects while the client believed nothing was working.
The mistake that no one spotted
At the time, Danny’s agency was still small, with just a handful of people managing client accounts. One client, an autism therapy provider, was seeing healthy campaign performance inside Google Ads.
Clicks were increasing. Cost per lead looked strong. Everything inside the platform suggested success.
Yet the client was becoming increasingly frustrated because no enquiries were arriving.
The problem wasn’t Google Ads.
It wasn’t the landing page.
It was the email notification system.
Every lead submitted through the form was successfully stored in the database, but a technical failure meant the notification emails stopped reaching the client. Since neither side realised the emails had failed, the issue continued unnoticed for weeks.
By the time the problem was discovered, dozens of leads had gone cold.
Why the emotional impact was worse than the technical problem
For Danny, the financial loss wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was feeling that his agency had let the client down. Because the client was someone he knew personally, the mistake felt deeply personal.
His team had spent weeks proudly reporting positive campaign performance while the client saw no return from their investment.That disconnect created feelings of guilt, regret and helplessness.
As Danny explained, it felt as though they had taken the client’s money without delivering value—even though the campaigns themselves had actually worked.
Honesty became the first step
When the problem became clear, there was no attempt to hide it. Danny believes honesty is the only viable response when mistakes happen.
Rather than making excuses, the agency investigated immediately, exported every lead stored in the database and supplied the client with everything they had recovered. While many of those opportunities had already gone cold, at least the client had access to the data that still existed.
From there, the focus shifted from blame to prevention.
Building systems that stop the same mistake happening twice
The experience fundamentally changed the agency’s processes.
Instead of relying on a single notification email, they introduced multiple safeguards, including:
- CC’ing the agency into every lead notification.
- Automatically logging every lead into a shared Google Sheet.
- Regularly testing forms to confirm both submissions and notifications work…
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