Earlier tonight our Dyson Ball decided to give up the ghost and fall apart – not bad really for over 4 years constant use; but it obviously meant it was time to buy a new hoover. Being the super SEO type that I am, I turned to none other than my trusty Google SERPs.

What I found was… interesting. I clicked on a House of Fraser Product Ad (the PPC ads that look like shopping results) and ended up at a dead end. It was a URL I hadn’t seen before, and assumed it was a error on Google’s redirect/tracking URLs:

So I clicked back to the SERP, selected a different ad and ended up where I expected; and then did the same again a second time with the same result. Clicking on the HoF ad still sent me to the “native_url” 404.

So I did a new search, this time for [white bedding]. Sure enough, there was a HoF product ad over on the right hand side, and sure enough it again sent me to a similar dead tracking URL.

The question is – is this a Google issue (unlikely) or is this a fuck up by HoF or their agency instead? If it’s the latter then that’s a lot of wasted click spend before somebody rocks up on Monday morning to notice the error. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in THAT meeting!

Update (01/12/2012): it looks like House of Failure (or Google) have pulled all of their product ads for the time being. Either way, they’ve lost a lot of traffic this weekend.