Anyone else forget about ad campaigns and lose money?

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Andrew

Andrew

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Jun 24, 2006
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I have accounts at probably close to 20 ad networks now. Just found out over the last couple weeks I've spent around $600 on Adbrite for a campaign going to an inactive offer. Alone its not a big deal but its getting fucking hard for me to keep track of everything I'm doing. :mad:
 


I had this happen on a smaller scale. I had a campaign that was doing well and then advertiser decided to pull and was redirecting to another offer Needless to say I almost lost money. We should get an email whenever an offer changes or an advertiser decides to pull.
 
sounds like you need some automation. I keep all my offers in a db. Then I pull the page and log it into the db, then anytime there's a change I have the script send me an email. Cron it up and then you don't have to worry about it.

<?

DBConnect();

$sql = "SELECT * FROM offers";
$sql_out = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());

while ( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($sql_out)){

$orig_html = $row['html'];
$affiliate_url = $row['url'];
$description = $row['desc'];
$company = $row['company'];
$affiliate_id = $row['affid'];

$scrapedhtml = file_get_contents($affiliate_url);
$compare_result = strcmp( $scrapedhtml,$orig_html);
if(!$compare_result){
mail('changes@mail.com','Offer '.$description.' has changed!',"Your link for ".$description." has changed. It's hosted by ".$company." under affiliate ID".$affid.". Check this url ".$affiliate_url );
}
}
?>

I was bored for a minute!
 
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Well the problem was I knew the offer was pulled, what I didn't know is I had *any* campaigns running in Adbrite.
 
Yup, accidentally switched on an old adgroup. Realised a week later.
Lost about $100. Youch.
 
I didn't lose money, but I lost the opportunity to make money. I turned off Google's Search Network for one of my campaigns just to test things out, and it wasn't until a couple of weeks later that I remembered that I should change it back. It was at least $200/day of easy money that I left on the table.
 
I run trackers for all my pages as well, whether that's double redirects through my server to an affiliate page. Passing the traffic source in the url. Some sort of tracking code on the landing page. But especially with paid traffic I think it's always good practice to pass the source and keyword in the url you're using. Then you can see exactlly what going on. Match that tracking with the list above and build some checks and you have no worries.
 
Once you get to a certain point the management and checking of small things will overtake you. It's always good to practice to build automated checking tools even if it's not that big of a deal, because then you never have to think about it.
 
it actually happened to me couple of times.. rather with couple of campaigns..

i had few campaigns running that were getting maybe 2-3 clicks a day for a week so i figured id just leave it and i was out of town and forgot about them...

a week later i come back.. $50/day campaign for 7 days.. $350 each campaign.. for 3 campaigns..

and i only got about 2-3 sales out of that :\
 
Its funny you bring this up. I am not experiencing the same issue you are, but at the moment it seems all of my sites have caught up with me. I can no longer manage all of them, nor can I hire someone to do it for me, which is a bad, bad thing. The problem is that I was ignorant, I really didnt know then what I know now, so its almost like starting from scratch here, I dont even want to deal with the shit. I am now working on a smarter more managed network, but chances are you will see me here a year from now bitching that if I new a year ago what I new then, blah, blah, blah....

BTW good shit Smax!

Jer
 
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