How To Avoid Web Traffic Disasters, Part 1

Disaster #1. Forgetting To Put Your Fuel Cap Back On

Have you ever forgotten to put your fuel cap back on your car? Not only is it dangerous but you end up costing yourself a fortune as fuel can literally start spilling out of your car - it’s just like pouring money down the drain.

You wouldn’t want to do this in the ‘real world’ would you? So why do you do it online?

When you set up a new AdWords campaign on Google to start getting some pay per click traffic into your website be careful that you don’t end up costing yourself more than you can afford or get less valuable clicks to your site.

AdWords lets you set a maximum daily spend which is handy for capping your spend. A mistake that I made though was when I was advertising one of my own products.

So this was a very targeted pay per click campaign that I was running to get people into my site that were specifically searching for my product by name. The reasoning behind this is that, in theory, you should get less tyre-kickers clicking on the ads as people already know exactly what it is they want.

So anyway, I set up the campaign and activated it.

Everything looked fine but I checked back the next day and I’d spent a small fortune on clicks and not made one poxy sale!

What had gone wrong?

Well, I’d left the tick box on the option "Include Google’s extended site network" or whatever it is they call it. This is basically the option that shows your ads on other people’s websites who are running AdSense ads for Google.

So if you leave this ticked you end up with your ads showing all over the place online and not just in the Google search results. For a specific campaign like this you only want your ads showing up in Google as ads anywhere else are going to attract less-targeted clicks.

You can save yourself a lot of money and wasted time by remembering this one!

Note: I’m not by any means saying to discount using Google’s wider network to place your ads outright. All I’m saying is that when you are running a highly targeted, specific product-orientated campaign like this my testing has shown that results from direct search far outperform those from the wider networked AdSense sites.