What? How can it be a bust, yet successful at the same time?

When I started my first few PPC campaigns with Google, I could not get any impressions for the life of me. I think it was because it took about 5 business days for my new Adwords account to get approved with Google. There were definitely some frustrating times waiting for this to occur. So in the mean time, I was taking all my keywords and advertising to Microsoft’s adCenter for my polls. The results were less than stellar. On adCenter, I received no greater than 2000 impressions and zero clicks. Obviously I needed to get my impressions into the 6-digit range to be truly have an impact. And then Google pulls through.

When Google finally approved my account and my campaign, I was on a mad dash with the only account I had active there. Within 12 hours, my stats were as follows:

  • Impressions: 270,524
  • Clicks: 93
  • CTR: 0.03%
  • Total Cost: $18.96
  • Total Revenue: $1.70
  • Total Loss/Gain: $(-17.26)

So while I was happy that I finally got impressions with Google, in no less than 12 hours, I had quicky burnt through $18.96 of my hard earned money. The campaign has since been paused while I fix some issues with my landing page and tracking software. These were the mistakes I made during setup that must be resolved before resuming my campaigns again:

  1. Offer was not mentioned on the landing page.
  2. Topic was not emotionally catchy enough.
  3. My tracking sucked big time.
    1. Could not tell which clicks were sent to the offer page.
    2. Could not tell which offer was being presented at the time.

My biggest beef about my setup was my tracking software. I really couldn’t tell from the overview page which clicks made it through to the offer page versus which ones bounced right away. And the only way for me to see if I received a lead was to log into each affiliate network to check my stats for the day. I really fucked up setting up Tracking202 and the software itself was not designed to support this kind of campaigning to boot. I have now found a workaround in Tracking202 that will show me clicks, click through, and leads.