Playbook, marketing agency
Something is broken and spend is still going out
There is one version of this worth designing for, and it is not the agency's own website being slow. It is a client's site failing, or a tracking tag disappearing in a deploy, while paid traffic keeps arriving and being paid for. None of that can be diagnosed from published documents, and every sentence spent trying is a sentence during which money leaves.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for service outages holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The cost of the outage is being paid continuously in media budget, so the correct behaviour is to shorten the conversation rather than to handle it well.
- A missing tracking tag is the version nobody notices for days, because the site looks fine and only the numbers are wrong, and by the time it surfaces a reporting period is already unusable.
- Responsibility is genuinely unclear at the moment it matters: the site may be maintained by the client's own developers, the platform may be having a problem of its own, and the agency may hold only the campaign.
- The client is often not the person who can fix it, so the useful reply gets somebody from the agency onto it rather than sending the client back to their own team carrying a diagnosis from a chat window.
How it arrives
- our site is down and the ads are still running
- the tracking has stopped recording anything
- conversions have gone to zero since the site update
- can you pause everything until the site is back
- is the platform having problems or is it us
- who do we tell when the site breaks out of hours
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The urgent route, ahead of everything else | The number or address for something breaking on a live account, who answers it and how quickly. It has to be reachable from the first line of an answer, because whoever needs it is not going to read a page. |
|---|---|
| What the agency is responsible for and what it is not | Whether the site is maintained by you, by the client, or by somebody else, and who holds the campaign. Written before an incident, because during one it sounds like an excuse. |
| What happens to spend during an incident | Whether campaigns are paused, who decides, how quickly, and what that costs in pacing. Clients want this settled in advance so the decision is not being negotiated while the meter runs. |
| The measurement check that catches a missing tag | How and how often tracking is verified, and what the client is told when it breaks. This is the failure with the longest tail and the one clients are least equipped to notice for themselves. |
The reply
If a site is down or tracking has stopped while campaigns are running, do not work through this with me. Use the urgent route on our contact page now, because I cannot see a site, an account or a tag, and spend continues while this is being typed [1]. Our published position sets out who maintains what and what happens to campaigns during an incident, which is worth reading afterwards rather than now [2]. Leave your name and an email here too and it will land with the account team.
It tells the reader to stop reading, which is the only genuinely useful thing available in this pair. The reason is given in one clause so it does not sound like a brush off. And the document about responsibility is explicitly deferred, because it is the right document at the wrong moment.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any report of a site, a form, a tag or a campaign behaving wrongly, whatever else the message also asks.
This needs a person with the account open, right now. Use the urgent route on our contact page, and leave me your name and an email so there is a written record of when you reported it.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never diagnose why a site, a tag or a campaign is behaving as it is.
- Never say campaigns have been paused, or that spend has stopped.
- Never blame a platform, a developer, or a client's own change, for an outage.
- Never say numbers will be corrected or filled in once tracking is fixed, because data not recorded is usually gone.
Questions
- Should the assistant answer this at all?
- Only to route. It has no visibility of any account and no ability to change one, so its entire contribution is putting the urgent route in front of somebody fast and taking a name and a message with a time on it. That is worth having, and it is the whole of it.
- Can it tell whether a platform is having an outage?
- No. It reads the documents you gave it and nothing live, so it cannot check a status page or an account. Guessing at a platform problem is worse than useless, because it sends the client away reassured.
- How do we stop it being helpful in the wrong way?
- Set the caution so a weak match returns your fallback rather than the nearest technical page, and write that fallback for this case specifically. The dangerous answer here is a plausible troubleshooting suggestion that costs twenty minutes.
Keep reading
- Everything for a marketing agencyService definitions and engagement terms convert. A price quoted for work nobody has scoped is the trap on an agency site.
- Handling service outages in generalThe assistant knows nothing about an incident unless your material says so. A status page it can read is the fix, and reassurance is the trap.
- A client is chasing a deliverable that has not landedThe article, the creative, the report. Usually the answer is that it is sitting with the client, which is the hardest thing to say.
- The insurance question that arrives with a contract behind itCorporate procurement wants a limit and a certificate. What the assistant may confirm, and why it must never state a number.
- The quote question every agency site gets, and the number nobody should sayBespoke work has no price until somebody scopes it. How the assistant gives a published starting point without naming a number for the brief.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.