What I’m about to write may sound obvious, but I didn’t do it, so I think it bears stating. When advertising on Google Adwords, be sure your ads are as targeted as possible to avoid wasting money.
Originally I listed every keyword I could think of that was related to RakNet in some way. I came up with like 80 keywords, in fact Google makes it easy to do this.
I set a budget of $20 a day, and almost immediately hit my cap. The campaign optimizer suggested I increase to $100 a day. But as I previously wrote, I had no new sales nor did the forum show increased activity. About the only increased activity I got was Chinese spammers. I wasted about $300.
I went back and targeted all my ads. In the ad for example it clearly states that it’s a C++ programming library. I also disabled ads from non-relevant categories (porn, law enforcement) which are enabled by default. I also disabled ads from domain parking pages, since programmers are smart enough not to go to these pages anyway.
This dropped me down from instantly hitting $20 a day, with a recommended cap of $100, to spending a few dollars a day.