If you are anything like me, when you find a profitable campaign, you do everything you can to milk it for every dollar. When you are seeing margins over 100%, it’s all about driving additional volume so you can make more money. After all, 100% margins on $100 is nice, but when you are addicted to profit, you want more!

However, there is a very fine line between margins and volume, and you need to determine where you draw the line.

Here are a few real examples of how being greedy ended up costing me thousands of dollars.

Running Traffic During Down Times

This can be difficult to gauge at certain times, especially if you don’t have the volume to gather enough data to be sure you aren’t leaving profit on the table. However, after you have an idea about how your specific campaigns are performing at different times of the day, it would only make sense to run them during the most profitable periods.

Here is a chart of the ROI (return on investment) of one campaign I ran:

It would have made sense to run this campaign at night. The data was gathered manually, and in some cases I estimated what I think it would have been. I didn’t stay up for 24-hours/day for a week! I plan to write a post in the near future about day-parting and how it can turn a campaign into a money funnel, right into your pocket.

How Do You Even Know Where to Start?

You should have an idea going into a campaign of how it will perform to a certain country or at certain times. Think about your target market and when they are online. Now, many companies are allowing their employees to access Facebook from work to increase morale. Keep that in mind.

• Remember time zones, and/or time differences – You have a campaign marketed to teenagers and are ready to go. You launch it at 3:00 PM and you live in New York. It’s only noon on the west coast, and California is a massive source of traffic.
• Figure it out manually. I’m sure many marketers have systems for this, and it might be something to look into, but up until now, I have done this manually. You run the campaign, greedily during all hours of the day if you are hoping to make more money than you really think you are going to make, and then determine your cost vs. revenue for a specific hour. Gather this data for a week or so, and you should be far on your way to milking your campaigns like they are cows.

Not day-parting my campaigns was the primary factor that ended up costing me thousands of dollars in one month. It’s not because I didn’t know the power and importance of day-parting, but because I was greedy. I saw the margins and hoped they would continue throughout the day.

Hoping for Better Conversions DOES NOT Bring Better Conversions

As I try to be optimistic most times, I usually give a campaign the benefit of the doubt. Not only that, but I have had some campaigns that I thought were going to be absolute flops, and they did exceptionally well. Because of those two reasons, sometimes I run a campaign for awhile and just hope it will perform well.

My Most Unfortunate Experience

I launched a Facebook campaign and it started doing well. I turn the traffic up because the starting margins were around 100%. Hell yeah, let’s give it more traffic. Hour passes, margins cut slightly, but that’s alright, I’m gathering data and making money, I won’t complain. Give it more traffic, and notice the margins decreasing. Well I know my demographic and know they should be active and ready to convert for me, right? Wrong. Long story short, I kept throwing more money at this campaign, and ended up losing over $1,000 in one day. This is an actual example of being greedy AND stupid – don’t EVER mix the two.

Running Failed Campaigns After Giving Them a Break Usually Fails

This could be considered being lazy as well, but I tossed a mixture of stupidity and greed above, so why not include this too! Before I explain this, do know that I have had instances where I stopped a campaign due to lack of performance (either from the beginning or after it began to decline) and actually had it profit again after resuming it. In my experiences though, this is a rarity.

I believe you should kill a campaign and not look back if:

Again, I have ran campaigns, they performed horribly, but I wasn’t satisfied. What did I do? Turned them back on only to lose more money. Dumb.

On the other hand, you might want to give a campaign another shot if:

Likewise, I have had plenty of campaigns that were doing solid, consistent numbers, but they started to decline. I paused them for a short period of time (anywhere from 1-3 weeks usually), and started them back up. Voila, back to the profits! I can attribute that to the fact that the market was getting bored with my specific ads, but since most online markets are growing rapidly, there are always new eyes and wallets for you.

Final Thoughts

While having data is always a benefit, trust your gut. It’s very similar to gambling in that you shouldn’t bet on what you want to happen, but what you think will happen. It is definitely a hard concept to grasp and put into practice.

The other thing is that you might not feel like you have enough data to make an intelligent decision. If you are running very little traffic, it will take you longer to determine the profitability potential from your campaign. If you are running large volume, you should be able to analyze your numbers fairly quickly.

Gather your data, and make intelligent decisions.

Don’t be dumb and lose thousands of dollars making the same stupid mistakes I have made.