How 7 Minutes Can and Has Cost me £700
Simply put “Check your websites daily, check they are up, check the links, and check your commission and ppc budget” It’s a dangerous thing when something goes wrong and you don’t. A had noticed a decline in sales from a certain sector, and I just presumed that it would bounce back as it has done various times before. I didn’t pay too much attention to it, nor did I log into my adwords account much at all in a week…big mistake. I finally did yesterday to find that my spend for the past 7 days had been £866ish. That’s ok nothing abnormal, but then I did a total for past 7 days on Affmeter (checks all your commission at once) to see that the totals brought in for the site in question was only about £200. This means i’m down about £700. This wasn’t right and after checking stats I found the reason. The links from the site went to the merchants as normal, but the merchants had removed all the products that my visitors were looking for. 
If I had checked the site and links which would’ve taken less than a minute a day I could have saved £700 . Now I think I’ve learnt a valuable lesson 
January 9th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Ouch. Sorry to hear that Max. This is one of the problems of having so many links / campaigns etc. Surely some bright spark could invent a script to do this thing automatically?
January 9th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Ouch Max…. I’ve done something similar a couple of times. Worst loss was about £600. Then the other day I mis-anticipated the January holiday rush and drove down to huddersfield (2nd Jan), by the time I’d got there I’d delivered 4,500 irrrelevant clicks to a holiday merchant after Adwords suddenly put me on some nice broadmatch terms. Thankfully only £250 this time, but honestly… you need eyes in the back of your head sometimes!!!
January 10th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
In my worst ever mistake I did nearly £3,000 in an hour!!!
I was testing the term FINANCE and wanted to make sure I was in top spot so added (a stupid) max cpc of £35 to guarantee it.
When the stats began to update an hour later I realised that i’d actually added it as broad match and not “phrase match” and that google had placed me top of the keyword LOAN at a CPC of £32.65!!! I could have cried!
Heres the stats:
Keyword: finance , Clicks: 83 , CPC £32.65, Total: £2,710.04
January 10th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
That does beat my £700 lol
I’ve heard of cases such as yours where google refund them…not sure where I read it but it was where they did something by accident and emailed google and google refunded them.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Sorry to hear about this Max. Surely the merchant should have mentioned that the products had been taken down?? If they don’t do this maybe you could write a script that checks that their pages are live every 6-12 hours by checking for 404s or defined text strings… may be worthwhile anyway to save your manual checks.