Hello Haveaclues! It’s me, Barry Hott!

I just uncovered a broken website redirect bug that caused my client to lose $25k in revenue so far this month and I wanted to share that story with you.

BUT, before I share that, I want to welcome you to my VERY FIRST newsletter! 🎉 Thanks for subscribing! I’m very excited and kiiinda overwhelmed to start this.

I hope you make it to the end of the email (don’t just skip ahead), I have something for you down there.

Or if you don’t make it down there, please just reply to this email now and say something, anything, for example: “omg congrats on finally launching the newsletter, what took you so long?” or “Barry, this newsletter was way too long”.

If you want to encourage me to do more emails in the future, you can buy me a drink. Yes, that’s really a thing I built on my website and yes, people I don’t know randomly send me money, and yes, I do use that money to buy drinks.

While today’s newsletter isn’t about making ugly ads, if you’re struggling to make high performing (ugly) ads, please reply to this email with “ugly ads” and we can see how I or the team at Adcrate.co can get your performance heading in the right direction 📈

Moving on, let’s talk about this newsletter a little bit:

You may have noticed up above that I called you “Haveaclues” and wondered “what did you just call me, Barry?” Welp, that’s what I’m calling you, people who have a clue about ads, marketing, growth, agencies, performance, DTC, CRO, UGC, and any other abbreviation or anything else you’re here to read about from me.

But why “Haveaclues”?

Are you ready for a short and cute story?

When I was a young Barry, my baseball-loving dad would gather me and a bunch of my friends every weekend at Allenwood park and teach us everything we needed to know about the game of baseball and let us have some fun. He called us “Haveaclues” because we were the kids who had a clue about baseball.

Much like my dad shared with me and my friends everything he knew about baseball with the goal of us becoming better ballplayers and having fun, I’m going to share with y’all everything I know about baseball and teach you how to have fun playing baseball.

Wait. No, not baseball.

I mean marketing and business stuff.

If you’re reading this, you know what I like to talk about. I’m going to tell you stories and tips from my last 15-20 years of advertising. (Did you know I ran my own crappy link exchange when I was like 14?)

Haveaclues is just a newsletter for now, but I hope/plan to expand Haveaclues to be a broader community, brand, and empire. We’ll see!

Alright, back to the original reason you’re probably still reading, my client losing a shitload of money:

Earlier in the month I flagged that performance dipped, seemingly related to a site issue, but I couldn't identify the root cause then. When I flagged it, I was told "nothing changed" so I moved on, assuming performance was just naturally down.

Today while still seeing performance was below where I expected it to be, I dug deeper and found several previously great ads were driving to 404 pages and some other were driving to completely dead links.