In episode 338 of PPC Live The Podcast, I chat with Nick Handley, Paid Media Lead at Impression, about one of the most defining mistakes of his career — and how those early missteps often create the most resilient marketers. The series digs into PPC professionals’ biggest “F-ups,” but always pairs the horror stories with how they bounced back, who supported them, and the long-term lessons they carried forward. Nick’s experience perfectly illustrates how a single error can completely transform the way you work — in a positive way. The Black Friday mistake that shut everything down Nick rewinds almost a decade, to the very beginning of his time at Tyres on the Drive (now part of Halfords). With just about seven months of PPC under his belt, he found himself in charge of campaigns over the Black Friday period while a senior team member was away on holiday. The brief seemed straightforward: update URLs across several campaigns using Google Ads Editor. But the implementation went badly wrong. Nick mistyped a portion of the landing page URL — a tiny mistake with huge repercussions. After the upload, ads across the account were disapproved, essentially switching off paid search during one of the most critical sales windows of the year. At that point, PPC was responsible for roughly 70% of the company’s conversions. “It was absolute panic,” Nick recalls. “I honestly thought I was going to get fired.” Panic only compounds the issue What made the whole episode even more difficult wasn’t just the typo itself — it was everything that happened in the aftermath. In…