I know the feeling when you are ready to turn a campaign on, you want to do it as fast as possible so you can see the results. The problem is that unless you are 100% confident your campaign is complete it could ruin the initial launch which is one of the most important times of your campaigns life time.

I mean if you were to launch something and it get loads of traffic and 0 conversions you would be worried right? Chances are unless you have a budget you will reduce bids, delete keywords or even stop the whole campaign.

What if that problem was your landing page links didn’t work properly? You’ve just threw potentially millions of dollars away for rushing the launch of a campaign. It’s happened to me which is the reason I will create this checklist for you to go through after each campaign is ready to go.

1) Check all links work as intended

There is nothing worse than having a link misspelt and not being able to identify it before it’s too late. After you have uploaded your landing page you should either visit your page or use a proxy and make sure it goes to the offer fine.

Also you need to check the type of your links, for example if you are using a review style page you might want to use target=”_blank” so that they open in a new window.

2) Check your landing page in all of the main browsers

This is probably drilled into everyone’s head but I’ll do a quick recap just to make sure. Some pages will look fine in Firefox and be totally messed up in Internet Explorer, and vice versa. In other words if your site looks a mess in IE and the majority of your visitors use IE, guess what – you will have shattered any chance of making a profit before you even started.

Just make sure you check out your landing page in other search engines before you start spending money on traffic.

3) Check your tracking is working

This isn’t really hard to test but is worth the few minutes it takes. Just check that when you tried your links are working that your tracking picked you up and recorded your visit. There is nothing worse having the data but nothing to match it with to make any educated decisions on the outcome.

4) Check bandwidth allowance

I’ve seen this a couple of times, especially with people that are new to PPC marketing – you don’t even have to be a big volume PPC marketer and this could affect you. If you use a reseller account you setup an account for each domain and run your campaign. The problem is that those are often restricted to a certain amount of bandwidth per month and when you reach that limit the site will not be available to anyone. You should be keeping on top of this increasing the limit if needs be, you would hate to have any downtime, especially on a profitable campaign.

I’m sure there is more but I’m having a mental block (plus it’s a Friday evening so I need to get ready ) I will add to the list if I come across any more.

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