It is not uncommon for new (or even experienced) internet marketers, who are anxious to start their ad campaigns, to make mistakes in their haste to get going.

Unfortunately, this can lead to poor results, lost money and wasted opportunities. Below is a list of the most common types of mistakes and what to do to avoid them.

1. Jumping in before doing your research.

We learn a new marketing strategy that looks easy and has already worked for someone else. We’re tempted to jump headlong into it as well.

Big mistake.

Before you can begin any campaign you must know your exact goals, how to properly find your best customers and, at least, have your tracking correctly set so you can measure your results and make any necessary adjustments.

2. Not developing a persona for your perfect customer.

You need to know who they are, age, gender, what are their problems and biggest challenges. You also want to know where they live, what do they like and what are their online buying habits, just to name a few.

Remember, you’ll never sell snow tires to teenage girls. So, know your customer.

3. Know your metrics (the most important ones).

There are many tools available today to help you measure the metrics of your campaign results. You must be sure to look at the right metrics.

Having a high click-through rate (CTR) may make you feel good, but what if those visitors never convert to paying customers.

We’re in business to make money. So the one metric you should always measure is return on investment (ROI). If, for example, you’re split testing several ads, ROI would be the key factor in determining your winning ad-not CTR.

You must also establish a lifetime value for your customers (LTV) as soon as possible. This number will let you know how much to spend to acquire a new customer.

What you don’t measure, you can’t fix.

4. Not split Testing.

Many new marketers will create one landing page or one banner and begin running a campaign. How will they ever know if the marketing angle they’re using is the best one to attract paying customers?

You will never know which approach is the best unless you test several against each other.

You can split test to a very granular level. Aside from testing one ad against another, you can test different headlines for the same ad copy, different images against each other and even different fonts and colors. The possibilities go on and on.

As you become more proficient with split testing, you can get as granular with your testing as you want and use your results to optimize your campaigns.

The more you test, the more profitable your campaigns will become.

5. Not setting up proper tracking.

Tracking is a must-if you don’t track, you won’t succeed.

There are free analytical tools like Google Analytics which will provide you with a world of information about your website traffic. There are also paid tracking tools such as ClickMagick which you can use to split test ads, find your most profitable keywords and tell you where customers came from-both geographically and even which website they came from.

You must track in order to optimize your campaigns. Most campaigns start out at a loss and it’s only through analyzing that data that you can fine tune your campaigns to profitability.

Not tracking your results is like driving your car with a blindfold on-not a good idea.

If you can avoid making just these few elementary mistakes, you’ll find a much smoother road to success.