*ed note: Thanks to Al Scillitani who posted the idea for #12 in an early comment are. Broad match with no negative keywords is a great catch. And now we have alliteration with our our Dozen Demons!

We all are guilty of sometimes pushing a PPC campaign before it is absolutely buttoned up. Just as you would have someone QA and copy edit your other marketing, you should be sure that someone with a good proofreading eye is checking your paid campaigns before you press send.

Yes, we all try to do that, but sometimes, maybe the day before a big U.S. holiday, we decide to rush a job before the break, and chaos can ensue.

Pitfalls of Pushing PPC Too Fast

1. The biggest mistake I see people make is in emailing their copy. Comments are sometimes made, and then you or someone on the team keys the ad in your application or a web console. Then, my friends, is when typo trouble hits. Try this instead: get your comments via email as always, key your campaign and immediately pause everything. That's when your colleague should look for errors live on the web.

2. Check your landing page the same way. One big difference: click every link, hopefully while you're not logged in.

3. Did you opt yourself out of the content network if you meant to or are you ready for 2,000 impressions at search CPCs?

4. Should your campaign have a stop date? If not, why not? Don’t you want a hard stop just to make sure you check on things before resuming

5. Have you set a daily report to be mailed to you? You may not read your keyword phrases every day, but make sure to drill to the Ad Group level every day.

6. On geo-targeted campaigns, do your ranges overlap? Worse, did you just slap the obligatory circle around a centroid and keep going? If so, how much of that big national park did you target?

7. Are you passing a variable back in your URL to tag your traffic the way you want or are you sure your analytics package is good enough? Sometimes just eyeballing the server log live beats waiting for your analytics to update.

8. Of course you’re testing your landing pages and your keywords and your copy, but are you testing CPC vs CPM vs CPA?

9. If you are in-house and have an affiliate program, you’ve undoubtedly updated your affiliate agreement to prevent the affiliate from bidding on certain terms. But how many of them are already bidding on the terms or sites you’ve chosen and that they are allowed to buy? (Note that this could be good and bad, but the good is sometimes harder to find than the bad)

10. Most importantly, do you have a success metric tied to ROI? Even if you are not engaged in a direct sell, create a reasonable metric that the team (and your boss or client) agrees with. That might be $X per visitor or $Y per free signup of $Z per download of a toolbar or blog subscription, but express that figure in dollars and cents.

11. And a bonus for my CFO friends: create a small income statement for the campaign. Clock your time in research, campaign prep and pushing the campaign. If you’re paying an agency, be sure to count any additional fees. Don’t forget time spent on checking and tweaking the campaign as well as your reporting at the campaign’s completion. Your time isn’t free even if you’re a sole practitioner working from a home office. Value your time and make sure the ROI reflects that expense.

12. The last comes from the aforementioned Al, with his too-true reminder that using broad match keywords without a negative is a bad thing. Thanks, Al. Check your match types before you press "Send".