If the most ghoulish thing you can do in Google AdWords is not know how to structure a campaign, the 2nd most ghoulish thing is to be “asleep at the wheel.”
Namely, sticking new things in your AdWords account and forgetting to go back and check on them. There are some people who have literally become skeletons by doing this!
My Google Halloween Horror Story:
One time I set up a Placement for a targeted site, paying Cost Per Impression. I forgot all about it and several months later noticed that $5,000 had vanished with ZERO conversions.
OUCH.
You kind of take a big gulp when that happens, doncha? Like I say, “If you blow your month’s budget the very first day and get zero sales, the millionaires and billionaires at Google will shed not a tear….”
Over this Halloween weekend we’re launching a mini-contest to see who has the worst content network horror story to tell. Money lost, clicks poured down the drain, placements on all the wrong sites, promising new businesses thrown to the dogs.
Post your story below as a blog comment, and we’ll give a prize to the most haunting and scary one we get. The winner gets a free 30-minute 1-on-1 consultation with Shelley Ellis, our resident content network genius.
We’ll also give you a $200 discount on a reserved seat in our upcoming Content Network Bootcamp with Shelley, which starts November 18. (Details coming soon.)
Shelley is a rabid – and yet painstakingly careful – tester of every idea and concept, and knows how to take any AdWords user, regardless of their experience, and get them performing in top form with profitable content network traffic.
Her experience and insights are known and trusted around the AdWords world. She’ll be a featured speaker this next week at CRS (Content Revenue Strategies) in New York City.
So tell us your best (er, worst) story on the blog below, and win 30 minutes with Shelley.
Perry Marshall
P.S. Consider this a gentle reminder to go through your AdWords account today and make sure you’re not bleeding money someplace… maybe this will be the blog post that saved you $1,000 with 15 minutes of work. That would $4,000 per hour – very productive time.
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About the Author
Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.
He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.
20 Comments on “Halloween Horror Stories on Google's Content Network”
I’m being terrorized on the content network by $3 clicks from the dead (parked domain sites).
You can turn those off.
Its not just Google that does crazy things. Yahoo is an even bigger pain in the butt. I just put up a campaign on there and used their little slider thingy. I thought I was bidding around 25 cts to link to a clickbank book.
I checked on Yahoo and noticed my ad was #1.
Checked my stats and I actually was paying $4 a click! Luckily I was able to lower my bid before major damage happened.
Our nightmare story was with a Chartered Accountant in Ontario. Which are generally referred to in Canada as CA’s by an abbreviation.
Being extremely competetive field, corporate accounting. I added “toronto ca” & ca on Broad – with a whack of negative keywords to control the words.
Over the weekend analyzing the traffic. Just about every .ca (The Canadian domain) had been flagged. Including Sex Sites which shall remain nameless!
The Traffic report is a testament to why you should never use 2 word abbreviations on broad, especially if it is a domain abbreviation hmmmm .tv anyone!!
You would be amazed how many clicks (No conversions) we received.
Our budget was not completely totalled, just my pride.
Although the funny thing is we could never notify the client of the potential niche market. Which I don’t think he’ll be optimizing for anytime soon!
Google Adwords is NOT designed for the advertiser to make money but for Google to make it all. It’s the perfect con: Google gets paid and you (the payor) oftentimes get nothing in return. It’s like gambling or playing the Lottery. If you’re going to throw money away, then just flush it down the toilet instead. At least then you’ll get some enjoyment from watching it swirl around the bowl a few times before it disappears.
I agree with the one response about the $3 clicks…that is really frightening. But my actual story relates to an account that I was reviewing as a potential client. They were spending $50k/month, but were still doing things like combining search and content in one campaign. Because the content campaigns were sort of camouflaged, they were hard to monitor. I found that one content campaign had a cost per conversion of…$21,000. No lie. Now that is scary!
These google content network nightmare stories are really, really, educational.
Thankfully, my clients and I will get to be the beneficiaries of these lessons.
Thanks to all of you.
Moral of the google content network story seems to be – Watch your step, stay awake, keep a close eye on your budgets and don’t depend on Google alone.
Everyone’s lost a little money, but what about something truly valuable, like 50 hours of life?
A client of mine is in the picture framing business, and last year I bit the bullet & put myself in charge of expanding out from Search to Content to drum up more traffic (I’d kept content out of search campaigns, just like a good boy should).
My very first Content Network campaign. I was more than excited. I copied the entirety of my best search campaign adgroup, all 2000+ keywords, into a brand spankin’ new content campaign adgroup.
Perry, I don’t need to tell you the rest of the tragic tale. I wrestled with every variable from here to Timbuktu trying to get one impression, even one carefully researched placement. Then I added more keywords, just in case.
It was actually your interview with Shelly earlier this year that made me realize why I was starting to have lucid nightmares about this unyielding Wall Of Adwords monster – so many hours, so many weeks. Ugg.
We’re all better now.
I still wake up sometimes wishing I had those 50 hours back though.
It’s the witching hour – g’night.
One Occasion I recall, Working with a client selling a book, the sale price was $34.95 and we needed conversions at $20 to cover all costs and make a decent profit.
We had opened up Youtube on a cpc content camapign and the 1st couple of days had over 600 conversions at next to nothing, So analyzing those figures I’d decided to try a cpm campaign. We had a daily budget of $5000 on the CPC campaign and set it a bit more conservatively for the cpm campaign, just $2000.
I set it up around 10am, still no activity at 2pm, went out and checked it again at 10pm and the client had already paused the campaign after $1000+ spent and only 3 conversions and a not so nice email in my inbox. Thankfully he got over it and he still has me looking after his account 18 months later.
Happy Halloween everyone. I’m in New Zealand so it’s already over for us here on the other side of the world!
Content Network Nightmares. Yeah. We’ve all had them. I had one whilst working on a client’s account. We had set-up several content campaigns in multiple languages, targeting a range of selected countries from around the world. The clicks were flowing in at 0.01 per click. My client was happy, he was successfully monetizing his site, and we got the site up into the top 1000 sites on Alexa based on visitor volume. And all within just 3 months!
So… our ads were in the jetstream, we were flying high, but then like in that movie Gremlins – something attached itself to the wing and scared the s**t out of us! Ads started getting disapproved left right and centre, we dropped altitude, and finally within weeks had to crash land!
Multiple calls on the phone to Google, left us with more questions than answers. The same old – “Your ad infringes on copyright ..blah blah” kept on coming up.
The reason for all this – It seems as though Google was at this time just “buying into Youtube”, and at the same time systematically turning off all potential competitors in the online movie space. My client – running an online film network of 100% legitimate independently made films – got the chop, with the same efficiency as Jack Nicholson running around with his axe in the “Shining”
Anyway – we got the message.
We switched CPC networks, diversified traffic sources, sorted out SEO, and learnt – like you always said Perry – never to rely solely on Google for all your traffic.
A scary lesson for sure – but a good one!
I’m being terrorized on the content network by $3 clicks from the dead (parked domain sites).
You may be a skeptic, but I‘m, convinced the entities roaming these lifeless websites and clicking my ads are not among the living, and I must continually summon the courage to login to my adwords account with crucifix in hand to exorcize these demons from my campaigns before it’s too late.
My Halloween advice: Don’t be afraid to enter the Networks tab in adwords to see who (or what) is haunting your campaigns, then use Exclude placements to cast these unwelcomed residents back to the spirit world…
…but beware, just when you think it’s over…
“They’re baaaaack!”
Happy Halloween Everyone
You really think that Google cares about $200? You have some serious paranoia if you think they were studying your logins! You can set the times that you want a campaign to run, and yes absolutely the money will start flowing out as long as you haven’t set your CPC or CPM too low. You clearly didn’t set it up right.
This ones easy! I’ll prove that Google is a Ghoul and why I haven’t used Google adwords of any flavor since.
It all started with a little Google content network campaign. I don’t remember what I was advertising now, maybe a self help course. Anyway, I set up my campaign and I used a strategy that Mike Dillard had suggested of setting the daily budget really high so as not to impede any traffic for a whole day. I had it set for $200 or maybe $170, whatever the default was at the time. My thinking was that I could carefully watch it and as traffic started to flow, I could scale back the budget numbers. So to make a long story short, I carefully watched my campaign several times per day for two entire weeks and was receiving no traffic, no impressions, no anything for two weeks. (Those of you that say a campaign starts within minutes don’t know what your talking about) Then happened the nightmare, I woke up the next day checked my adwords account and my whole daily budget of $200 dollars had been used up between the hours of like midnight central USA time and 6am (yea all within 6 hours or so, While I was asleep)! I immediately put in a support ticket expressing my concern while at the same time Google was immediately taking the money from my credit card (yea even though they don’t take money but Once a month LOL yea right). After they took my money, they then replied to my support ticket and said there was nothing wrong with what they did and that they stayed within my daily budget amount. Here’s what I think, I think they studied my login and checking my account activities for two weeks and then when they knew I was sleeping they turned on Major traffic just so the gazillionaires could get another 200 measly bucks. Greed comes to mind.
Enough of my Rant,
Miles Hennis
Internet Freedom Marketing
Perry,
I had 5 content network campaigns set up and all optimized. These things were singing. I had fantastic placements, history built, yea… Google loved me.
I received an email from the vendor I was advertising, and they mentioned their site was down. They thought it would be a few hours before it would be back up.
I was spending a ton of money on these campaigns.. I figured I would pause the offer until everything was back up, saving me about $300 per hour.
About an hour later I was informed all was well, so I unpaused and waited for my flood of cash to resume.
My traffic dribbled back and never recovered to full throttle.
This ONE decision to say $300 cost me THOUSANDS.
I learned a valuable lesson… never, ever, ever, EVER pause a content network campaign! Use the ad scheduler to reduce instead a full out pause.
Peter
Some years ago I started a small cosmetic business with my wife. Well she wanted to own a business as I already had one.
Like any new business I got excited and decided to give her a hand. That was my first mistake!
I did the work she collected the money and watched TV while I was doing all the marketing after I came home from work.
That was my second mistake trying to do too many things at the same time and instead of doing due diligence I did due negligence as you once put it Perry.
I was using Google Content and Adwords thinking that the flood gates would open and the sales would flow in and instead the money poured out to the tune of £15000.00.
I got sales but they didn’t come anywhere near the cost of pay per click and as I was so busy in my own business I put the cosmetic business to the back of my mind and out of my back pocket came the money.
I am now back again having another try at this as I have the time (more managers).
Just bought your new version of “Google Adwords” and signed up to your “Intermediate Mastermind Club” but this time with a different product less competitive than cosmetics as I learned the hard way.
I’ve been reading your letters and website for the last five years I’m still too scared to even try Adwords.
The problem is not how to do it, but what to do, where to start, how to find the topics that could make money and are something I am interested in.
Did you try Glenn Livingston…seems to me thatès the place to start!
Sorry to say but I read some ebook on adwords by this guy Perry and didn’t make these ghoulish mistakes…
Sheesh!
I recently tried Google Content Network to bring some traffic to my site. I kept $10 per day limit and 25 cents per click. It did not show much activity. I increased the bids slightly, still not much activity. I was not even getting enough clicks to reach my daily budget.
I decided to increase the bids to around $1 and due to some family problems could not access the account for few days. The end result was lots of clicks, no conversion and a big fat Google Bill.
I also did not know that if Google cannot use your daily budget one day it will use that days budget plus the next days budget whenever it can. I thought that my putting daily budget I was safe but not really. I did learn a lesson though, do not keep your eyes off the ball.
I never had this problem on the content network. But about three years ago while using the Google search network. I tried to bid on Harry Potter keywords for a blog I was experimenting with.
In one day I got almost 500 clicks. Lucky they were cheap clicks.