Lost $335 Using Adwords Yesterday
Man I have to laugh at what happened to me yesterday. As some of you might know or others might not, there is a slick marketing ploy that is used by some internet marketers that involves PPC (pay per click), Google Trends, and a site that you own.
What’s done is this: You keep an eye on Google Trends. This is a great tool for seeing what the hottest searches on Google are. It is updated hourly I believe. So let’s say you see a really hot trend that’s moving up the charts. For example we’ll use the movie Cloverfield. The idea is to have a site or even a little blogger site set up with ads, cpa offers etc. You make the focus of this site (in this example) Cloverfield. You can have some auto generated stuff even.
You then go to your Google Adwords campaigns and create some adwords around Cloverfield. You make sure they get high enough to get some immediate traffic to your site.
The goal of course is to pay some money in those adwords clicks but the traffic to your site will convert to some sales.
Are ya with me?
So, yesterday I decided to try this tactic. I had absolutely no intention of making any real money. I just saw a hot trend, “volcanic” as Google calls it and slapped a blogger together.
The trend was Heath Ledger. The news had just come out that he’d died so I slapped a blogger blog together, put some ads on there and then went to my Adwords account and picked some keywords.
Once I did that, I picked my cost per click for each word and most importantly I chose my daily budget. I only wanted to see what kind of traffic I’d get so I chose a budget of $20
Cool.
About an hour later I checked my adwords account and saw zero clicks or impressions for any of my keywords. Hmm….interesting. Another hour went by and I checked again. Nothing.
Well, the day ran on and I got involved in my usual crap, i.e. trying to find something else to keep my money rolling in. At 4:30 I was wrapping things up and decided to check the adwords account.
I had about 15,000 impressions and about 860 clicks at a an average cost per click of .39 per click. My total cost out of pocket was about $335.00. That’s right…$335.00.
AARRHGHGGHH!!!! What the fuck!!?? I shut that thing down immediately.
So, here’s what I don’t understand and here’s what I learned.
1 - Why did Adsense allow my daily budget to get blown out to the tune of about 17 fold?
2 - Clearly the method can and does bring traffic. We saw that. What I didn’t do was create a site that was put together well enough so nothing really converted. Like I said, this was all done haphazardly and at the last minute. Of course, thinking I only had $20 to lose is why I did it. It was merely an exercise. No thought of making money.
Fortunately for me, my other earnings yesterday more than covered this loss but I do have to admit to being pretty pissed off about it. I would suggest you go for this but do it intelligently.
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4 Responses to “Lost $335 Using Adwords Yesterday”
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You know, I only saw one other person on AdWords targeting Heath Ledger. So that was YOU! LOL!
I’ve heard stories of the ‘daily limit’ not quite working…but man that’s extreme.
You should click on my sig over at BHW. Those guys are GOOD!
[…] after emailing their adsense support team. If you don’t remember, I posted last week how I Lost $335 in a few hours using Adsense I emailed them politely asking why my Amex got dinged for over $300 when I put a $20 cap on the […]
Just speculating… maybe they multiplied your daily limit by 28 and used the monthly limit? That is an odd story, however. At least you only payd 39 cents a click.
When the legendary club CBGB closed, I tried buying adds for as page I already had up which talked about the place. I set a limit of $20/day… and the quoted minimum bid was ten bucks, so I accepted that (hoping the actual cost would be much less… but arrghh, I bought only 4 clicks for 40 bucks. That was back when you could see where the clicks were coming from… and they didn’t even appear to be legitimate sites where the clicks were coming from.)
One precaution I highly recommend, BTW, and this is slightly off-topic: be very selective about the countries where your ads run, especially keyword ads. Bogus clicks come from everywhere… but there are some countries which produce lots and lots of bogus clicks and few if any real ones. (India, Nigeria, Gabon, Romania and Korea are the worst offenders. Since you can’t set up a blacklist, I advise setting up a white list limited to the USA, Canada, Japan and Western Europe.)
@timothy, good comment on the daily multiplier as I had totally forgotten about it. Regardless, they had credited me the money before I even knew it.