Entries from March 2008 ↓

So I’ve been skeptical about signing up for Twitter of the last few months, but I decided a week ago that I’d give it a try.   So far it’s really been a pretty cool service as it’s just pretty much a way to stay up to date with people by following short updates of what they’re doing.

I know it doesn’t seem like anything groundbreaking, but I’ve enjoyed it so far.  In addition I see a whole world of marketing opportunities for that it can be used for in the future so I’m definitely excited to see how things progress with it.  So if you want sign up for Twitter and go ahead and follow me and see what I’m up to.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a ton of research on the web for some different projects. During my research I’ve come across a staggering amount of sites that are running ppc ads, but when you click on that ad their site is actually down.

So lets think about this one for a minute. These advertisers are actually paying to be in the sponsored results but clearly either they aren’t monitoring your ads or haven’t made a proper investment in quality web hosting. It actually made me think of how much of this probably goes on all the time. I guess when you think about it with the mass amounts of people looking to get their business on the web, then the result is probably going to be a lot of inexperienced people trying to do it all themselves. The biggest problem here is the fact that not only have you paid for that visitor, but you’ve also lost a prospective customer that could have turned into a lifetime customer. So ultimately the overall costs can be much higher than what you pay per click when you look at the bigger overall picture.

The Simple Solution

Well here are my suggestions on how to keep from wasting money sending your prospective customers to site that’s down.

• Site Monitoring Service - Sign up with website monitoring service to monitor your site and notify at any time of any outage. I’ve used Watchmouse in the past and I’ve had great experience with them, but there are also a ton of other free or low cost site monitoring services you can use. Just do some searching out there and you’d be surprised as to what you’ll find. This is a small investment to make to ensure that your site is always online.

• Get a Reliable Webhost - Get a good company to host your website with. If your current host isn’t working out then do some searching and get some reviews of some reliable web hosting companies. I personally currently use Hostgator and I’ve had great success with them. Their support is great and I’ve always had great customer support with them and they’ve got some great pricing as well.

• Monitoring Your Pay Per Click Ads - Don’t just launch campaigns and then never check up on them. It’s pretty easy to make a mistake when launching PPC campaigns and all you’ve got to do is the monitor your campaigns and making sure that everything is just like it should be.  If you run PPC Ads then you should be monitoring them on a daily basis anyway.

So hopefully these tips can provide some helpful information for those currently running PPC ads that may be experiencing these problems.