How much $$$ have you lost due to stupid mistakes in AM? (9)
How much $$$ have you lost due to stupid mistakes in AM?
I was writing an article for my blog the other day, talking about how a silly mistake can cost you several 100s or even 1000s of $$$. Based on the replies I got from some people, I'm actually quite a disciplined person, considering the amounts some fellow marketers lost themselves. So don't be shy, I know you hang out around here, share your stories with us 
Let me start with myself, there are 3 silly mistakes I can think of really quickly.
1. adult campaign (USA GEO) with trafficfactory network, I was changing bid from $0.06 to $0.08 per click - instead of replacing just the number 6, I deleted the 0 in front of it too and ended up with a bid of $0.80 per click. I noticed this about 5-10 minutes later, but the daily budget of $100 was spent already It's a small amount, but since it was at the very beginning of my media buying journey, it really hurt
2. exoclick, adult dating USA again - and guess what, the same silly mistake as above This time I was trying to up the bid from $0.15 to $0.19 CPM, however due to my shitty mouse or shaky hands, I ended up with $0.9 CPM bid. This time I wasn't so lucky as the first time thou, I had to leave the office for a few hours and when I returned ... the $1000 budget was gone. As the campaign wasn't all that optimized, I lost about $500 on this. I bought a lot of data this way, so I was able to optimize the campaign later on and recover the loss pretty quickly, but I was still upset as hell as it happened the second time to me already.
3. this one is the most costly and most silly of the 3 I was preparing some campaigns for adwords, so I got 2 safe websites (with no monetization) prepared and made campaigns for them in adwords. Don't ask me how, but I totally forgot about these campaigns ... took me almost a month to get back to it and discover that I forgot to pause both of them. They were both approved and happily spending their daily budgets for almost 30 days. Fortunately, I had very low daily budgets set for both so the total loss was only about $1200. Since I have close to $40k monthly credit with adwords, the lesson could have been MUCH more painful.
So what about you guys, who can beat me? I know several of you guys did WAY worse than I
The wrong bid is a classic that I managed to avoid.
I have one very expensive mistake that I made without knowing. Took me a loooong time to figure out what was wrong, and I actually wrote about it on the forum, warning the others to not repeat it.
Different domains for tracking and clickthrough made me test tens of campaigns with -90% or worse ROI on offers that were super hot and crushing it on old campaigns.
Basically, I connected a new domain for tracking, but didn't change the click link on the landers. The old campaigns were doing OK because they had the old tracking domain but any attempt at scaling was met with abysmal CTR and super bad performance overall. The money spent on testing wasn't so high, a couple of hundred dollars probably, but the profits that were missed were pretty high. High 4 figures...
I try to avoid mistakes as much as possible, so my losses weren't really high.
However I remember one time on Adcash I forgot to target country (for country targeting you must click on "Advanced" check box otherwise the targeting is not visible, so being in a rush I somehow ignored it), the loss was around $200-300 in 1-2 hours, so not really high/bad.
To be partially covered for issues like this is always good to have "cloaking" rules in place that are there to protect you - so for example of the country does not match, redirect the traffic to services like Monetizer or YTZ, so the loss is not 100% when fire happens.
Another mistakes that happened were overspending by big amount of traffic coming in and as you know some traffic sources are not able to stop the traffic immediately when your budget is hit. This happened to me few times on Exoclick.
Originally Posted by erikgyepes
Accidently sat a swedish campaign up in norway and didn't notice it before it spent around $2000.. whoops
I believe that due to inproper tracking we lost 300k$ 
It took 3 months to detect this leak..
Originally Posted by delash
It took 3 months to detect this leak..
Do you mean that you effectively had a loss of $300k, or the PROFIT could have been $300k bigger with proper tracking?
On a traffic source they had the country targeting "hidden" with a click more button.
I forgot about it and bought worldwide traffic for a few hours spending $1,000.
Also some traffic sources ask you for the CPC instead of CPM, and a couple times I put a CPC of $5 and spent all the budget in 3 minutes.
Once in Zeropark I forgot to set a daily/max budget for a USA Campaign. Being US I spent 4 figures in less than 20 minutes.
Another one that made me think all my new campaigns were going shit was when I updated one of my domains and just added a number or letter at the end of it (e.g. domain.com and domainz.com).
Because my links were pretty similar I didn't notice I was sending my landing to offer traffic to another domain and thus my CTR was 0% and I just thought my new landers were so shitty for a couple days until I realized it...
Originally Posted by servandosilva
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