Heidi Sturrock shares how a costly mistake became a competitive advantage

Heidi Sturrock, a paid search consultant with 24 years of industry experience, joined me on a recent episode of PPC Live The Podcast. The episode covers a broad match mistake with an unexpected silver lining, and Heidi’s experience testing AI Max across 50+ accounts. The broad match mistake — and the unexpected silver lining Early in her career, Heidi ran a competitor conquest campaign for a high-spending B2B SaaS client using broad match — without adding negative keywords — and launched it on a Friday with a large daily budget. Over the weekend, the client’s call centre was flooded with angry calls from the competitor’s customers looking for refunds and tech support. When Heidi called the client to own up, he surprised her by seeing it as an opportunity — training his sales team to handle the calls as soft pitches, offering switchers a 50% discount on their first month. The campaign was then split into two — one targeting disgruntled competitor customers, one for general competitor prospecting — giving better control over spend and intent. The lessons: Don’t launch on a Friday, and know your stakeholders Two clear lessons emerged from the story. First, never launch significant campaigns or budget changes on a Friday — the algorithm needs monitoring during its learning period and mistakes can compound unnoticed over a weekend. Second, always include all key stakeholders in client meetings. Having both the entrepreneur and head of sales in the room meant everyone knew who to contact when things…

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