less than a day later I got an email saying they were ceasing to run my adds because I didn't have enough clickthough. I could reactivate my account ONCE then it would be $5 to do it again.
I feel ripped off. I thought, from all their pre-sales info, I'd have a chance to fine tune my keywords etc - not just a few hours. Not a word about clickthrough. As it was, I'd already given it my best shot for keywords, so I just let the whole thing drop.
So lets see it cost me $5.06 for one visit!
Don't mean to whine, but read the terms carefully, and especially be sure you understand that concept of clickthrough. I think Google is making a lot more money taking peoples $5s, then rejecting them, than on the legitimate side of Adwords.
If you used up your thousand impressions (the base they judge CTR on) so much faster than you expected, you need to figure out why. My first thought would be that you're bidding on terms that are way too general, or have another meaning than you think.
If you don't already know how to use exact matches or negative keywords, make it a priority to understand and apply those concepts before you turn your ads back on.
Don't sweat about the five dollars; it's an investment in your education. Once you get your ads working well, you will happily spend far, far more than that every month -- maybe even every day!
When running multiple adverts you also get a chance to see what works for you. and what produces the best ROI. You can then choose to drop your poor performers and fine tune the ones that are doing better. Another advantage of multiple ads is Google are very unlikely to simply shut down your account, they are more likely to freeze an ad.
Hope this is of some help.
Mack.
