Just before Halloween, the kind of night when the wind whispers through your CRM and shadows move across your KPI dashboard. That’s when the call came in.
On the other end of the line: a Dutch company caught in a full-blown digital nightmare. Not the jump-scare kind, but the slow-burning horror that creeps in unnoticed… until it’s too late.
And yes, dear reader, this is a true story.

Chapter 1: A Pact with the (Un)Known

In their quest for global growth, a company, I will not name and shame it, had a noble goal: expand internationally through digital marketing. The plan? Outsource Google Ads and Analytics to a third-party agency so they could focus on running their business.

The mistake?
They handed the keys to their international strategy to a small agency with no real experience in international advertising and no idea how to manage high-stakes campaigns.

They didn’t hire a guide. They hired a ghost.

Chapter 2: The Curse of the Ads Suspension

It started quietly. Campaigns stalled. Traffic dropped. Conversions slowed to a crawl. And then: the message appeared.

“Your Google Ads account has been suspended due to “Circumventing Systems Policy.”

A vague, cryptic curse from the depths of Google’s compliance dungeons. Even I had to double-check what it meant. This wasn’t just a small mistake; this was a total shutdown.
The business was suddenly invisible in its most important export markets. No ads, no traffic, no sales. Just… digital silence.

Chapter 3: A Landscape of Lost Opportunities

We dug into the Ads account—and what we found chilled us to the bone:

Entire ad groups left empty, like digital ghost towns

Incomplete geo-targeting that ignored core markets

Key search terms with no active ads running

Clicks? Gone.
Conversions? Gone.
Control? Never really there.

Their competitors had already crept in to claim the abandoned space. The market moved on, without them.

Chapter 4: The Analytics Abyss

Then we turned to their GA4 setup. And it was… chaos.

• Duplicate event tracking
• Inaccurate traffic data
• Key reports completely unusable

They had no way of knowing that actual visitors were leaving. No alarms went off. No dashboards blinked red.

And so they drifted further into the dark.

The Moral of the Story: Don’t Feed the Gremlins

This isn’t just a scary bedtime story for marketers. It’s a real reminder that cutting corners in international digital marketing can cost you everything.

Here’s what we can all learn from this horror story:

Specialisation matters
Work with agencies that truly know international marketing and are fluent in Google Ads and Analytics. Not every digital freelancer can handle cross-border complexity.

Ask for a track record
Check past projects. Look for client testimonials. If it feels vague, it probably is.

Stay in the loop
Even if you outsource, understand the basics. Know your KPIs. Know what success should look like.

Measure what matters
Don’t just install Analytics: USE IT. But make sure it’s set up by someone who actually knows what they’re doing.