What NOT to do with a New PPC Campaign

Posted on March 1, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, Google Adwords, PPC  

Over the years of me doing business online I have made my share of mistakes and hear from others about their mistakes.The key is learning from your mistakes or better yet learning from OTHERS mistakes. This mistake is one that occurs usually with a new person just getting into utilizing PPC advertising via adwords, Yahoo search marketing or MSN Adcenter. What you don’t want to do is setup a campaign an leave for hours without checking things out, as you would be surprised how fast your money can be spent. Especially if you are utilizing content or targeting high traffic terms like myspace, ebay etc… So on a new campaign check every few minutes to make sure everything is going right and you are turning a profit, or set your Adwords spend for the day of what you can afford to really spend.

This is VERY simple thing to do but you would be surprised how many new people contact me saying they burnt their budget in an hour. I know, I know where is the rocket science post that tells you how to make millions… well this isn’t it but if this post helps one newb not to blow their budget within hours on a new campaign and lose money this post is worth it.

Here is a second tip free of charge. Double Check your URLS!!!! About a year ago i was helping a friend over aim getting a campaign going in a high volume market and he had accidentally made a typo in his urls and was sending traffic to someone elses site the good news is he had only wasted 50 bucks before he noticed it.

Tell us about a mistake you made in PPC or CPA promotions by leaving a comment.



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Comments

13 Responses to “What NOT to do with a New PPC Campaign”

  1. dan on March 1st, 2007 10:04 am

    I ran a few campaigns on a crappy webhost. Every morning around 3am-5am the server would go down for unknown reasons. I only noticed it because I stayed up late one night to see how things were going and VOILA the site was down. Needless to say, I changed hosts.

    So I guess make sure you have a dependable webhost so you aren’t sending traffic to a non functioning site…

  2. Keith on March 1st, 2007 10:17 am

    Budgeting for 0.50 - 0.70 keywords thinking I would get number 1 and reap the rewards, converting those high ppc keywords to high paying offers. This didn’t work out to well.

    Now I keep a nice 0.05 - 0.12 ppc baseline…

  3. Marko on March 1st, 2007 11:02 am

    The company I am currently working for had a consultant managing all of their SEO and PPC and was spending 70% of the daily budget on broad branding terms which had low or zero ROI. I am in the process or reworking their whole PPC strategy and was hoping to get some tips on how much money( daily budget is $75 for Google, $50 for MSN and Yahoo!) should be spent on branding terms vs. terms that are more specific to the area and service. Thanks.

  4. CPA Affiliates on March 1st, 2007 12:02 pm

    Marko- It really depends on what your company goals are. I always look at it as what am i getting in return, if what i am doing gives me no return then it is not worth it.(but your return may be that when you do a flyer to people or send out they remeber they saw your ad on the net also???) Sometimes it is not worth it to me if i even get decent return. I guess how important is it to your company to brand or to get instant return. As branding is important but if your not getting enough return to keep you in business what good does branding do. Thats just my 2 cents hard to give specifc answers without specific details.

  5. Brandon Hopkins on March 1st, 2007 12:05 pm

    Very true! I spent $200 last week on accident by putting a bid at $.25 instead of $.15. I didn’t lose that much, but could have made a lot more!

  6. Jason Sadler on March 1st, 2007 1:02 pm

    I hate to drop the “check out my site” line, but we created a site dedicated to making mistakes. It’s amazing how much people don’t know or find out later on down the road about Google Adwords, Adsense and even Analytics.

  7. Jimmy Tang on March 1st, 2007 3:35 pm

    Hi,

    I just started reading your blog posts. i was wondering how I can get in touch with you? Thanks

    Jimmy

  8. CPA Affiliates on March 1st, 2007 4:09 pm

    Well once my redo is done with my design i will have a contact form. But for now i will shoot you an email to the one tied to your post.

  9. Borino on March 1st, 2007 5:30 pm

    Hoping things will improve over time, I wasted way too much time fiddling with a particular ad group. Give it time, test, adjust, and if something doesn’t perform, kill it and move on. Hoping it will pick up steam over time if you just tweak the bejeezus out of it is a monster time waster.

    Live and learn ;-)

  10. SonicReducer on March 1st, 2007 9:55 pm

    Good advice. You have to watch new campaigns like a hawk at first, because they always throw some surprise at you. Once they are running smoothly I set most campaigns to unbudgeted and let em’ roll.

  11. Garrett on March 2nd, 2007 1:15 pm

    Beware the one-word keyword!!
    If you’re generating a large list of terms from your free search logs, web tools, or other sources watch out for one-word terms. Sometimes a very ambiguous term (e.g. free, blog) can slip into to your list and run up a ton of unqualified clicks very fast.

  12. soul-healer on March 6th, 2007 7:26 am

    I started and wasted some money with no ROI. I read forums learn from blogs but didnt find the right product to advertise nor find the right keyword.

    And now a regular visitor of this blog i want to start once again. Can anyone specifily tell me the industry which has good ROI or i have to do all the stuff again by myself :)

    Looking forward to hear words from all of you specially the blog owner.

  13. John Loch on March 11th, 2007 7:31 pm

    I’ll admit to the following..

    MSN Adcenter. Dive in for a poke, setup a few campaigns experimental, run for a few days, then shutdown.

    All good, until I go back over the relvant account, and find six months later that around $50 per week (unaccounted) was being deducted by Adcenter.

    Yep.. I actually forgot to kill an order 6 months previous. It slipped thru the cracks for six months before i realised !

    The whole idea of putting limitations on daily spends is nice, but this one bit me in the ass :)

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