Um… OUCH.
Whoa.
This one hurt. I can definitely feel a sharp stinging sensation in the wallet area.
The past day and a half have been great. I’ve been bringing in sales like crazy. Every time I checked the numbers, they were higher than the last time. I thought I had cracked it, I really did.
Unfortunately, I was wrong.
I’m going to let you in on one of the fundamentals of PPC marketing, specifically the one I overlooked. When starting a new campaign, make sure you scrutinize the financing of it. Set a daily budget, set your initial bids low and then watch it like a hawk. These things can always be changed later, but not until you gather enough data to make an informed decision. Ignore this advice at your own peril, which happens to be my situation at the moment.
I woke up this morning and saw that my earnings had continued the meteoric rise I had been seeing the previous day. When I checked my click costs to calculate my net profits, I nearly spit out my coffee. I had spent 7 times what I had earned, a titanic loss. I realized that terms that were pending approval in Yahoo! had been added, that I had not set a daily budget and that (worst of all) I had foolishly accepted Yahoo!’s bid recommendations. Holy crap.
Fortunately for me, I have the financial flexibility to rebound from this kind of set-back. If you’re just starting out, however, you may not be so lucky. Like everything else in life, the fundamentals are key. If you don’t build on a strong foundation, whatever you’re building is going to come tumbling down around you.
