Field notes
Promotions that still fire after the banner comes down
The homepage no longer mentioned the code. The cart still accepted it. Merchandising thought the campaign had ended on Sunday night.
Campaign calendars and promotion engines are rarely the same object. In this shop the marketing calendar lived in a spreadsheet. The engine had a start stamp, an end stamp, a usage cap, and a stack rule. The banner team unpublished the creative. Nobody closed the code.
Buyers who still had the code in an email from the week before continued to check out at the campaign price. The margin report for that SKU family looked like a pricing error. It was a rule that had not been retired.
When we audit a catalogue we ask for the live promotion objects, not the deck that launched them. We also ask for a sample of carts from the first two days after a campaign is supposed to end. That sample is usually more informative than another screenshot of the homepage.
If your team cannot name the person who turns a code off, treat that as a finding before the next festive period.