How much have you lost in 1 day or 1 month?

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smaxor

smaxor

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Oct 17, 2006
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I see these threads all the time on how much you've made in one day. I know those are all motivational and stuff but for fun lets see the other side as well.

Could be due to:
  • Server crashes and you were paying for ppc.
  • Paying for a high amount of hosting and your methods stopped working.
  • Trying ppc in a new niche that gobbled up a ton of cash.
  • Gambling?
I've had a server crash and spent $2k sendding PPC traffic to a server that wasn't there over a 12 hour time period.

I've also had some very high hosting bills, close to $1k/day total and had days I made nothing as systems had broken. So I suppose you could say I was negative $1k those days.

The point of this thread is to let the n00bs know that a lot of time there's losing money involved with making it. But it's all about how things look at the end of the day.

Whatcha got?
 


1 billion dollaaaaaaaars!


more like about $600. I learned my lesson and no longer start a new ppc campaign before I go to bed. The campaign is my best now after making a few adjustments.
 
Lost $200 by 12 noon and I put a stop to it - was trying to promote payday loans as one of my first campaigns.
 
yeah payday can be a painful one especially if you bid on the primary words, 2-3$/click . That's the campaign I lost that money on. It was converting fine and then the server went down. I kept paying and it stopped converting :)
 
Form on the landing page was broken but PPC kept rolling in... all in all, once you factor in live bodies in the call center and those costs... $3-4k in a day lost on expenses, opporunity cost could have been ~$20k.
 
moomycow said:
About six years ago, working in SMS, I found out that a commented-out "Shit, I'm not working"-type notification cost me over £10k.

That was irritating.
Click to expand...
I'll say.

I lost $2,200 one day because my internet connection went down and a campaign that I thought had another 2,000 leads capped about halfway through the day.
 
I haven't lost any big money that like just yet, but the other day I submitted a few facebook dating ads that redirected to some random affiliate's True.com link so they would approve it (they seem to like True). The idea was to switch where the domain was forwarding after Facebook approved the ad and send it to a much more adult-themed dating site. After waiting about six hours for them to approve it, I got impatient and headed over to this girl's house who was having a party. About three beers in I remembered and frantically hopped on her laptop (which had a very weak connection that she is stealing from a neighbor) and checked my FB ad manager and lo and behold it had been running the ads for about two hours. So, if there is an affiliate on here who noticed an inexplicable spike in True.com clicks the other night, that was me. You're welcome! Haha.

Yes I'm an idiot for not reducing my campaign budget before I had all my ducks in a row. Oh and none of my networks carry True anymore, that's why I didn't use my own.
 
The largest loss I've incurred has been $7.50 on my third day of affiliate marketing. I've been actively marketing for the past three or four weeks, and have been spending $250 daily on advertising as of late. Even so, no significant losses to report here as everything has been profitable. :)
 
Never lost any money due to mistakes. My paranoia has created tools that texts my phone when a server goes down. That I have with me 24/7 (even in the shower).

But definitely did the old, buy tons of dedicateds and the method doesn't work lol... usually it's overkill when it comes to hosting.

And losing money in niches that don't work... sure everyone has done that. Years back, when I first tried PPC, lost like $1500 because I left content network on - and I'm 100% sure all the clicks were fraudulent.
 
I use websitepulse.com. They have transactional monitoring which is helpful for ensuring an entire process is running smoothly. For example, instead of just testing that SMTP and POP services are running... you can send a mail via SMTP and then check for it via POP to ensure the whole process is working.
 
I lost about $200 one time. I had an offer converting 2:1, then the payout dropped and the notification email got sent to spam. It was significantly lower than before and killed my conversions.
 
chatmasta said:
Observation: all those losing money in one day are doing PPC. :D
Click to expand...

Direct expenses? Yes. But lost opportunity costs could be just as high(er) if you are relying on organic traffic. Paying for the traffic in the first place just compounds it.
 
Back when I was a heavy currency trader, I had a $4,500 coffee-and-smoke break. Things went screwy all the sudden on a pair I was trading and I was never able to recover it, actually ended up chasing the loss up from about $3,300 to the final amount.


Frank
 
Lost $300 in a two-hour period on PPC before I realized the problem and stopped the campaign. Other than that, I also like to keep a very close eye on things.

I use ServerGuard24, which notifies me instantly via sms if any of my sites or servers are having an issue.
 
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