Overtures PPC needs a major overhaul

[bopub]

More and more sites are seen in the sponsored results
in Yahoo and other major search engines today using
overtures PPC plan. The search results and keyword(s)
used to pull up such sites is a reminder to a common
question who uses this service; Why is my money all
gone and nothing to show for all those click throughs?

I had several sites under one account with overtures PPC
and when I received a notice stating " you have exhausted
the funds in your Overture account" I began to investigate
this growing problem because now, all of my sites are not
listed any longer, I have spent all my money and I still
didn't receive any sales from all of this "so called
traffic" overture said I was getting.

My findings were totally shocking when I tried to generate
reports, which were 3 weeks old, the reports had data not
relevent to how much I spent on the amount of clicks I
received.

Another mind twister they throw at you is the fact when
your money runs out, shutting down your account, they get
rid of the number of hits you "so called received". So,
when my account runs out of money and my sites are taken
off the listings, I cannot find how all this money I just
spent was actually exhausted. This happened so fast with
so little evidence of why!?

I went a few steps further into my investigation and
found through my web logs that the amount of traffic I
was getting to my sites didn't match up to the "so called
clicks" I received according to overture.

So who's telling the truth here? Is there a glich in my web
logs or is overture hiding the real true way they take your
money and providing an automatic click through?

My sales conversion clearly says so. I received all this
massive traffic and not one sale. Our sites are designed
and optimized to sell our services and while using other
means of traffic, clearly justifies my findings.

Just like any ad campaign on the web and you can't tell
whether it drove anyone to your site, is it still an ad
campaign? How do we know whether the customers had clicked
on the URL's in our paid listing when we cannot find out
how, when or where?

I use web Analytics as the process of measuring and
analyzing the effectiveness of my e-business websites in
terms of customer experience, return on investment, and
site effectiveness. Now, my website collects massive amounts
of site visitors and usage data, but how do I analyze the
data to provide a better customer experience and determine
ROI if overture doesn't provide any kind of current or
updated information?

Overture, you need a major overhaul and you just lost
a valued customer. My search results will rely heavily
from now on with another PPC....Wake up!

[ctabuk]

Steven, Hi and welcome,we all want to read great replies to our posts,but you are selling webdesigns and marketting -yes? So why has your site got no keywords, no megatags, no megadescriptions etc etc. Yes you could have been spammed by competitors, or your potential clients simply did what I did and saw your own search results.

[leehill]

Overture is terrible in comparison to Adwords.

It takes around 38 hours to update the stats, google takes around 2 hours.

Overture rewards the big companies with the most money, google rewards the most relevant advertisers.

Overtures reports are terrible.

Overtures editorial review policy is terrible.

In a nutshell apart from the fact that you can pick up a phone and speak to someone at Overture, i dont have a good word to say about them.

[bopub]

Hi ctabuk,


Our main site does not have meta's as you discovered.
The sites mention in sig, were not all sites listed
in overture, and yes, I know there are some overture
fans present and the competition may very well have
been responsible to spamming. However, This does not
account for the actions taken upon by overture NOT to
give reasons behind a failed generated report. Tracking
the foosteps of visitors, page exits and landing URL's
are valuable to ROI even if PPC were not used in this
case. I appreciate your insight.

[ctabuk]

Steven, I agree with you, I have voted with my feet and have left Overture, but you are going to have to work on your site to make it SE friendly. Nothing sells better than success, it just takes time. You have found the best forum on the planet for everyday advice. Take a whole day off, read all the threads in SEO - GOOGLE - Yahoo, or as many as you can, whizz your site down to 'reveiw my site' and use the tools there, those tools changed my life and made me very rich!