The Launch That Should Have Been a Record-Breaker
A broken redirect is the kind of failure that looks like nothing went wrong. Visitors click a button, land on a page, and leave. No error message. No warning. Just lost revenue. Elaine spent three months preparing for her Black Friday course launch. She had 12,000 people on her email list, a 90-minute webinar recorded and ready, a countdown sequence that had been split-tested across two previous launches, and a sales page that converted at 4.7% in warm traffic. Well above her industry average.
Her funnel was a proven structure: email sequence drives traffic to a sales page, sales page links to a checkout page, checkout page processes payment and redirects to a thank-you page with course access. She had run this funnel successfully three times before.
Two days before Black Friday, Elaine's developer set up a new version of the checkout page to accommodate a special holiday pricing tier. The new checkout URL was slightly different from the original. The developer updated the "Buy Now" button on the sales page to point to the new checkout URL.
Except he did not update the right button. The sales page had two "Buy Now" buttons. One above the fold and one at the bottom after the testimonials section. He updated the bottom button. The top button. Which received 82% of all clicks based on heatmap data. Still pointed to the old checkout page URL, which now redirected to the homepage.
How a Single Broken Redirect Destroyed the Launch
Elaine sent her first email at 6 AM. By 7 AM, 2,400 people had visited the sales page. By 8 AM, she had exactly 3 orders. This is a broken redirect problem that monitoring catches early.
We dug into this further in our piece about page Speed Kills Conversions: How to Monitor and Fix Slow Landing Pages.
Three orders from 3,800 visitors. Her usual conversion rate would have produced about 178 orders by that point. She refreshed her Stripe dashboard repeatedly, thinking it was a loading error.
At 8:30 AM, she posted in her team Slack channel: "Something is very wrong. We have barely any sales."
Her assistant tested the page on her phone. She scrolled to the bottom, clicked the lower "Buy Now" button, and reached the checkout. "Works for me," she reported.
It took another 45 minutes before someone tested the top button. It redirected to the homepage. No error message. No indication that anything was wrong. Just a smooth redirect to a page with no buy option. Addressing broken redirect issues like this prevents the damage from compounding.
This is closely tied to what we wrote about in night Our Client Lost $47,000 to a Broken Checkout Page.
By the time they identified and fixed the issue at 9:15 AM, 4,600 people had visited the sales page. The vast majority clicked the top button, landed on the homepage, got confused, and left. The launch window. The critical first 3 hours when email open rates and urgency are highest. Was gone.
The numbers tell the story
- 4,600 visitors during the broken window
- about 82% clicked the top (broken) button, 3,772 people sent to the homepage
- Expected conversions during that window: about 216 orders at $497 each
- Actual conversions: 11 (from the 18% who scrolled down and clicked the working button)
- Revenue lost in the first 3 hours: about $101,885
- Total launch revenue: $67,000 (versus $190,000 projected)
Why a Single Redirect Was the Entire Point of Failure
Elaine's funnel had four pages: email click destination, sales page, checkout page, and thank-you page. Only one link was broken. The top "Buy Now" button on the sales page. The sales page worked. The checkout page worked. The payment processing worked. The thank-you page worked. One hyperlink pointed to the wrong URL and it destroyed 65% of her launch revenue.
This is the terrifying fragility of marketing funnels. Every step in a funnel is a chain, and a chain breaks at its weakest link. You can have a world-class sales page, a bulletproof payment processor, and a flawless email sequence. If the link between any two steps fails, the entire chain fails.
We see this pattern constantly. It mirrors the issues we covered in our deep dive on warning signs your funnel is leaking revenue. The most expensive failures are rarely dramatic. They are quiet. They are a single wrong URL, a missing redirect, a button that goes to the wrong place. A reliable broken redirect check would have flagged this within minutes.
What Pre-Launch Monitoring Should Look Like
Elaine now runs a comprehensive pre-launch check 24 hours before every launch and keeps monitoring active throughout the launch window. Here is her protocol:
24 hours before launch
- Click every link and button on every funnel page. Not just the primary CTA, but every interactive element
- Test from multiple devices and browsers
- Verify each page's load time under load. Launch traffic is typically 5-10x normal volume
- Confirm all tracking pixels fire on every page
- Test the complete buy flow end-to-end with a real transaction
During the launch window
- Automated checks every 5 minutes on all funnel pages
- Real-time conversion tracking with alerts if the rate drops below a threshold
- Automatic campaign pause if any critical page fails
- A team member dedicated to monitoring during the first 2 hours
The Lesson
Elaine's $123,000 loss came from a mistake that would have been caught by a 2-minute test. Someone needed to click the top "Buy Now" button before sending 12,000 people to the page. Nobody did.
The human error is understandable. The systemic failure is not. If Elaine had automated monitoring that tested every link on her sales page. Not just whether the page loaded, but whether every interactive element worked correctly. The broken redirect would have been flagged before the first email went out.
If you have a launch coming up, run a free scan on your funnel pages before you send a single visitor. It checks every link, every redirect, and every critical element. It takes less than a minute and it could save you from a story like Elaine's.