Keeping an eye on the news this week has given me more thoughts on how we all deal with our online paid search advertising. So this past week has seen a dramatic crash for the euro due to the Swiss National Bank’s decision to end its three-year policy of capping the franc at 1.20 a euro this triggered losses at Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG and Barclays Plc as well as hedge funds and mutual funds. Once again the banks have made an error in judgement that will undoubtedly end up costing us all. This got me to thinking, why didn’t these large corporate banks have a stop loss trigger in place or if they did why was it set so low? One thing I hate to do is lose money, a friend of mine lost around £500,000 through stocks, it made me realise how fickle the stock market can be and I’m sure everyone out there is the same when it comes to it, but it appears that banks are fine because it’s not really their own money.

Now seeing this it got me thinking are we all guilty of the same thinking and is it costing you your business? I don’t get away from thinking about work for long but I looked at our clients and realised that many of them when it comes to their Pay per Click advertising are running at this like those large corporate banks. It’s as though some of you are playing with AdWords using play money. Some are, well it’s not exactly play money it’s just that it is not their money! Marketing managers are being given a budget by the people who own the business and therefore if it doesn’t work, well there will generally be more cash available and they will try something else. The thing is there is no stop loss button on AdWords but there are a number of things you can do yourself to do this.

Firstly many people will just put a cap on the budget which means that when you hit a set amount you stop advertising. Well let’s just think about that not all of your Account is costing you money, some of it is actually making you some. So why on earth do you want to stop those parts that are making you money? This completely defeats the object and although you may be stopping the loss of budget you are also stopping your potential income therefore still losing cash. Alternatively you can look at your campaign in more detail and take the brave decision to stop the loss on the keywords or products that aren’t making you anything. I speak to so many people who sell hundreds and thousands of products and feel it is imperative to advertise every single one of them. This makes no sense if you’re not selling any of them.

The biggest reason for small to medium sized businesses failing is that there marketing costs far exceed their income because they feel that they want everything to sell all of the time. For the smart and savvy businesses out there you understand that this is untenable and will only end in disaster. For the rest there is only one road they will travel and that is the road to ruin.

If you realise you’ve maybe began to head down this road then don’t worry there is time to do a U-turn and turn your business around and put yourself back on the right road to success. Why not contact us and see how we can help you Stop the Loss on your PPC Campaigns.