How We Lost $1,026.47 On Google Yesterday
Well yet another stupid mistake cost us twins $1,026.47 (60% of the price of my new MacBook I just ordered). Let me explain what happened.
About two weeks ago I loaded up four new campaigns on Google’s Content Network. These campaigns were all niches we were already in, but we were doing some advanced geo-targeting to try to explore some new areas to expand. Using a combination of image and text ads, I had thousands of keywords and the campaigns setup just the way I wanted them.
Right off the bat three of the four campaigns started getting impressions/clicks. I let things ride and the very next morning I woke up to the famous “Google Slap.” I really wasn’t expecting it this time, as all of the sites had established page ranks as well as tons of unique content. But that’s Google for you; a slap for no logical reason at all. I went ahead and paused those three campaigns and decided to “clean up the mess” after I finished another list of projects. However, I forgot about one thing. The FOURTH campaign… I assumed it was slapped from the beginning as it just continued to get a $2 – $5 trickle everyday from the beginning. Rather than pausing it, I decided to let it run to see if it would ever garner traffic.
Busy with all the new projects we have coming up (some exciting stuff btw), I honestly forgot about that one campaign. Of course, I logged into my Adwords account daily, but it was always that $2 – $5 trickle. Yesterday, it was about 50 degrees here, so I decided to take a quick one-hour break and wash my car. When I got back home I noticed traffic FLOODING into our tracking system. Honestly, we have a lot of stuff going on, so it took me a few minutes to discover the culprit. Once I logged into our Adwords account my heart SUNK. Since I wrote that campaign off, I had removed that landing page from our server. So we had thousands of clicks going nowhere.
This made for a very frustrating day due to a stupid mistake on my end. One simple click on ‘pause’ would have saved us this money. I’m not going to continue to cry over spilled milk, but I did want to type this post to let you know, amateur, professional, or newbie, we’re all human and we make mistakes. We must learn from this and move forward even stronger!
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RSS15 Responses to “How We Lost $1,026.47 On Google Yesterday”
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I’m just confused why you removed the landing page if you were still letting it trickle in at $5 a day?
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John says:
Moral of the story: we are idiots. Haha, just kidding.. kind of. Real moral of the story: don’t let a mistake like this get you down because it happens to everyone.
I think these kind of posts are beneficial because almost everyone else posts about how they make X amount per month or day but fail to mention their downfalls. Sure, people probably consider us idiots but affiliate marketing isn’t all about the good. There are some mistakes you make that are very costly but you just have to be able to field them and move on.
Bryn – Haha, good question, not sure exactly what happened. I was just informed that we had to take $1K loss on that day’s earnings. Perhaps Ryan can explain it more clearly.
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Ryan says:
We were also promoting the same offer with a media buy. Yesterday morning we had made the decision to pause the media buy, but I completely forgot I was also using this on that Google campaign. It wasn’t until I saw the clicks come flooding in until I realized the mistake I had made. As I’m sure your aware of this, sometimes when you spend so many hours online you can get confused and make stupid mistakes! I should have made two separate landing pages for each campaign (which is what the original plan was) however, when the first 3 campaigns started out slapped, I decided to use this group of landing pages for the media buy. I was trying to do too many things at once and learned my lesson the hard way!
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Happens to all of us.
I had a campaign running on a beta version of the AdCenter Content Network with fairly low bids and what I thought was a daily budget in place. Came back two hours later and it had gone through $3000.
I had accidentally set my monthly budget as my daily budget and all the traffic was junk.
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Ryan says:
@anon… Call it whatever you want, but it happened 
Trust me I wish it didn’t LOL.
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Ouch, that really sucks. I know the feeling. That’s why I try to set the daily spending limit on small Google campaigns to like $200 a day or something to start. I did something similar before and spent about $200 in 30 minutes. Luckily I had set a daily spending limit.
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What tracking software do you use?? Also, use javascript to clear your comment form onClick. The “Your Message” parts stay in.
Josh
http://www.FullSpeedSEO.com
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Ryan says:
@Logan Thompson… We set our daily spend limits on all our Google campaigns to $5K in the beginning to avoid disaster. We should probably look at cutting this back!
@Josh in Phoenix… For our pay-per-click campaigns we use Tracking 202. For media buying we use some custom “in-house” software. Tracking 202 is the best I’ve seen for PPC campaigns. Thanks for the javascript note, I fixed that (never noticed it before).
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I’ve had a few mistakes myself. Like one of my first Google campaigns I ran – I managed to set my keywords bid to $20 instead of $0.20. Believe me, Google is greedy 
Luckily for me I found out pretty quickly.
I bet you burn off $1k pretty quickly on gas for your car
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What prompted the “flood”? Is this a campaign you may perhaps want to keep since you are getting the clicks now?
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Ryan says:
The campaign fell under manual review. It wasn’t a slap after all. Yes, we actually built back out the landing pages and used the campaign.
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[...] 3. SuperAffiliateTwins: How We Lost $1,026.47 On Google Yesterday [...]
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I’m just confused why you removed the landing page if you were still letting it trickle in at $5 a day?
John says: Moral of the story: we are idiots. Haha, just kidding.. kind of. Real moral of the story: don’t let a mistake like this get you down because it happens to everyone.
I think these kind of posts are beneficial because almost everyone else posts about how they make X amount per month or day but fail to mention their downfalls. Sure, people probably consider us idiots but affiliate marketing isn’t all about the good. There are some mistakes you make that are very costly but you just have to be able to field them and move on.
Bryn – Haha, good question, not sure exactly what happened. I was just informed that we had to take $1K loss on that day’s earnings. Perhaps Ryan can explain it more clearly.
Ryan says: We were also promoting the same offer with a media buy. Yesterday morning we had made the decision to pause the media buy, but I completely forgot I was also using this on that Google campaign. It wasn’t until I saw the clicks come flooding in until I realized the mistake I had made. As I’m sure your aware of this, sometimes when you spend so many hours online you can get confused and make stupid mistakes! I should have made two separate landing pages for each campaign (which is what the original plan was) however, when the first 3 campaigns started out slapped, I decided to use this group of landing pages for the media buy. I was trying to do too many things at once and learned my lesson the hard way!
Happens to all of us.
I had a campaign running on a beta version of the AdCenter Content Network with fairly low bids and what I thought was a daily budget in place. Came back two hours later and it had gone through $3000.
I had accidentally set my monthly budget as my daily budget and all the traffic was junk.
Ryan says: @anon… Call it whatever you want, but it happened Trust me I wish it didn’t LOL.
Ouch, that really sucks. I know the feeling. That’s why I try to set the daily spending limit on small Google campaigns to like $200 a day or something to start. I did something similar before and spent about $200 in 30 minutes. Luckily I had set a daily spending limit.
What tracking software do you use?? Also, use javascript to clear your comment form onClick. The “Your Message” parts stay in.
Josh
http://www.FullSpeedSEO.com
Ryan says: @Logan Thompson… We set our daily spend limits on all our Google campaigns to $5K in the beginning to avoid disaster. We should probably look at cutting this back!
@Josh in Phoenix… For our pay-per-click campaigns we use Tracking 202. For media buying we use some custom “in-house” software. Tracking 202 is the best I’ve seen for PPC campaigns. Thanks for the javascript note, I fixed that (never noticed it before).
I’ve had a few mistakes myself. Like one of my first Google campaigns I ran – I managed to set my keywords bid to $20 instead of $0.20. Believe me, Google is greedy
Luckily for me I found out pretty quickly.
I bet you burn off $1k pretty quickly on gas for your car
What prompted the “flood”? Is this a campaign you may perhaps want to keep since you are getting the clicks now?
Ryan says: The campaign fell under manual review. It wasn’t a slap after all. Yes, we actually built back out the landing pages and used the campaign.
[...] 3. SuperAffiliateTwins: How We Lost $1,026.47 On Google Yesterday [...]
15 Comments