I was testing out some campaigns on there, keeping the traffic at a trickle. An hour or so ago I decided to pause the 4 campaigns I had running as the tests were not going very well. I selected them all and clicked Paused. The interface changed to say “You have no Campaign ads currently running or pending review.”, as it should have.

So far so good.

A few minutes later I saw in Prosper202’s Spy view that traffic was still going to those campaigns. Hmm, perhaps it takes a few minutes for it to stop or its just residuals? Reasonable enough. I started to keep an eye on the traffic and what happened next was the exact opposite or what should have happened – the traffic began to increase to at least 2 of the campaigns. Then it increased some more and started flooding in, relative to what i was seeing before.

Not only did the campaigns not pause, which would have been not such a catastrophic fuck up, just a major one – it appears my targeting or my bidding was reset/wiped out/changed. I am not even sure the traffic was coming from the right countries.

I triple checked everything in Adbrite – there is no question all my campaigns were paused. I resumed the campaigns and then paused them again, hoping it would work the second time and tried to find a support email address. The Help page was no use whatsoever. The Contact Us page has only a ‘press inquiries’ address and for a link to a contact form, “in case you didn’t find an answer in the FAQ”. After filling out the contact form it followed up with “You will receive a response within 24 hours.”

I dont know if bigger spenders get an account rep or something, but I’ve never heard from a human being at Adbrite. The support system sucks – had the traffic not stopped was I going to have to wait up to 24 hours to get a response? I dont know yet if I’ll get billed for the traffic, in which I’ll need to chase up a refund or that was a a gift (hey it happens – in fact 3 days ago another platform ran for a few hours without recording impressions, so free traffic for all, thank you very much), but lets see what their support comes up with. I expect them to be as hopeless as their platform.

UPDATE: Well, a couple of days later and no reply from Adbrite. It doesn’t look like I was charged for the extra traffic though, so thanks for the extra 2 leads I got from it, Adbrite! Yeah, if the campaigns were doing better then that I would not have had to pause them in the first place. Wonder if I can replicate triggering Adbrite’s free traffic ‘feature’…

UPDATE 2: Got a reply shortly after the last update, telling me that it takes a while for the traffic to stop after you pause a campaign, after I already explained to them thats not what happened. Anyway, I’m way over bitching about Adbrite and much rather give MediaTraffic an earful right now, but then the blog cant all be about the sand in my vagina can it.