Thought this could be an interesting topic... Q: What was your biggest AdWords mistake when starting out? Mine... A: I ran my first attempt at Affiliate Marketing on a spyware tool, back in the days of SpyBot/AdAware hitting the triple digit traffic growth. I thought, what a great way to supplement the money I was making off AdSense, I'll reinvest in AdWords for the keywords: SPYWARE, REMOVE SPYWARE and some others. It ran in AW Search network for about a week, snapping up $300+ per day, but profiting about $60-90/day in net profits. I thought it would be great to kick on CONTENT network... Nothing for about a week, same profits from Search Network, so I increased my daily budget and CPC so Content would take off. 7 days of 0 click + 0 impression on content, raised budget and CPC again. Left for weekend trip (4 days away from computer). Came back and had $9,000 worth of content network fees waiting for me. Ads weren't approved for content network until Fri (after I left), which churned somewhere near 100k impressions per day and nearly as many clicks... Luckily the budget saved the last day and stopped the ad from continuing. Google made me pay every single penny on that. Needless to say that blew away the previous profits and buried my start up capital. I'll never forget that lesson.
i havent made any big mistakes on adwords that ruined me completely so far.having heard too much about ppc and adwords that are costly i started with low daily budgetand when i had a good grip on it i increased the budget.many people make the mistake of using adwords with high budget without experience.
OUCH! Oh man. That hurt reading that! I would say that my biggest mistake at first wasn't really doing enough KW analysis. That kinda burnt me and used up my $100 coupon...
This was my biggest mistake when starting out: I kept increasing my max. CPC bid to get a higher position. On broad match terms! The result was a whole lot of irrelevant high cost clicks in their full sexy glory