I can tell you from the beginning, no one likes losing money. No matter how rich or poor someone is, no one likes losing money.

I really dislike losing money, I don’t mind investing in buying data, I find that a long term thing which is acceptable and a part of the game.

Let me tell you about a very small mistake that cost me over $2000 in less than a minute.

I am very much into automation and scripts as long as it saves time. I like to see things done as efficient as possible. I am by no means an expert coder, but I can write some basic and simple scripts.

This all started several years ago when I wrote one of my first url scrapers. It pass several tests successfully and I had others test it, it looked like it worked perfectly. So I decided to start using it to scrape URL’s for a PPV campaign. The first campaign, it worked great, I added 100 URL’s with no issues, everything was perfect. The second campaign was great as well, so I thought everything was great!

Fast forward (I don’t know how many campaigns later), I scraped 50-100 URL’s and added them to my PPV campaign, I even set my budget to $50 a day just in case something went wrong. BOOM – the campaign goes live, I get all happy and login to check how much traffic I’ve been receiving and to my shock, it was enough traffic to crash my server. At this point I start to panic and log into my PPV account and I found out that I didn’t need to pause any campaigns. My available balance was not only exhausted by it was in the minus, I actually owed the PPV traffic source $1800+. At this point I start to get really confused. I checked my recently created campaign, and it was the cause of this. I checked my targets and low and behold, some targets that were scraped with with generic terms (bing, www., http, .net, .com) and it also had google and several other horrible targets. So bad enough I crashed my server, all the traffic being sent was not targeted at all and thus didn’t convert, and to top it off, I had to pay a fair bit of money to use my account again.

I can’t blame anyone but myself for this mistake, I was foolish and didn’t go through all of my targets. Hopefully everyone can learn from my mistake, even when using tools, double check everything!