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.

Well it’s been awhile since I’ve been able to update this lately, sorry I’ve been busy with some other ventures including Daily Deals. Currently I’m sitting here writing this as a major ice storm is just getting going here in Kansas City. It looks to be a major event and I’m guessing that most likely I’ll probably be without power tomorrow so if that happens things will really suck.

I’ve been putting alot of effort into affiliate marketing lately and I’m seeing some nice results so far. If you’ve ever considered trying it out I highly recommend signing up with NeverBlueAds. They’ve got a ton of offers to choose from including some really good ones that can generate some nice cash. They’ve just redesigned their site and it’s laid out very well and I find it extremely easy to use. If you get a chance go ahead and sign up!

Okay Now Lets Get to the Point of This Post
Ever since I started pay per click marketing I constantly heard horror stories about the Google Content Network. I’ve read so many things recommending that you turn off the content network on your campaigns because it’s wasted traffic that doesn’t convert into sales or leads. Well I actually believed this myself for the longest time until I actually did some testing.

Over the last month I’ve been promoting some affiliate offers over the content network and the results have been outstanding so far. Currently I’m seeing about a 400% ROI on my ad spend and I really haven’t even begun to optimize these campaigns because they’re just something I threw out there to test. I think that if I take the time to really put some work into them then I’ll definitely be able to see even greater ROI on my ad spend.

Now don’t get me wrong this may not work for everyone on their campaigns, but I’ve got a point that I’m trying to get across here.  If you automatically shut off the content network without even testing it out then you might be missing out on some very good traffic that does convert and converts well at a low price.

If  you do decide to do some testing here is nice method that I’m going to start using to constantly test my traffic from the content network.

1. Turn on conversion tracking in your adwords account and make sure that you’ve had the proper tracking code inserted on whatever affiliate offer that you you’re promoting.
2. Once that you start seeing conversions in your adwords account then run a placement report  to see what sites on the content network are converting for you and which ones aren’t.
3. Now that you’ve got that data to go off of you can exclude your ads from showing up on sites that don’t convert.  In order to do this click on the campaign and then look for the Excluded Sites option and then click add.  Now just add the sites here that don’t convert for you and you’ve easily taken an additional step to increase your profits!

So just remember the next time you’re planning on turning the content network off from the start you should really test it out first.  You never know but it actually may convert better than the search network and at a lower cost.

A few months back I downloaded the Google Adwords Editor and for some odd I reason I never used it. Well today I decided that I’d give it it a try and now I’m kicking myself because if I’d started using it earlier it would have saved me a ton of time.

The program itself works great and you can easily access your Google Adwords account from your computer without having to login to the site over the web. Essentially you can do pretty much anything with the editor that you can when logged into the Adwords site. Today I spent about half the time I usually do on a daily basis managing my Adwords account. So far the thing that I see is a really big advantage is ability to easily make bulk changes to your account in very short amounts of time. Oh yeah and I forgot the the best part about all of this, its FREE!

If you’ve got an Adwords account I highly recommend this great tool, because its already started saving me a ton of time. The only other request I’ve got at this time is for Yahoo and MSN put together their own account management tools to manage their PPC programs!