Advertising mistake costs Google $10 million 💸
An intern pressed the wrong button, placing a yellow rectangle instead of adverts on thousands of websites.
A Google employee taking part in a training exercise reportedly pressed the wrong button by accident, placing yellow rectangles on dozens of websites and apps instead of advertising banners.
The mistake happened last week and appeared on numerous websites and apps in the United States and Australia for around 45 minutes. The failure to prevent a basic human error may have cost the tech giant around $10 million.
The search engine has admitted the mistake and said it will refund advertisers' spending, but has not confirmed the value of the losses.
How did it happen?
It all happened while a group of Google interns were learning to use the electronic system, according to a source close to the process. One trainee went further than intended and ended up submitting a purchase order.
Nobody at the headquarters of the world's most widely used online search tool spotted the error for an hour, an eternity in the online auction market, given the enormous reach of those placements.
Apparently acting unintentionally and without knowing what they were doing, the intern placed the purchase at ten times the normal price for advertisers, other sources said. Those orders had a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of more than $25, far above the usual $2 to $4 in the advertising market.
The weakness exposed by such a basic human error shows how fragile and highly automated the advertising business is, with large volumes of inventory bought in real time at the click of a button.
The infamous yellow rectangle was placed on Google's AdX, an auction system for buying advertising space in real time across thousands of websites and apps.
Confirmation
Google confirmed what happened in an email. "An advertising intern carrying out a training exercise caused an error that incurred real costs and ran on advertisers' websites for approximately 45 minutes," it said. "As soon as we became aware of this unintentional mistake, we worked quickly to stop the campaigns," the California-based multinational added.
The US company also said it was working to introduce more safeguards into the process to ensure mistakes of this kind do not happen again.
