Overture

topic=OVERTURE

I've got plenty to say but it's also true that I have many more questions than answers.

The only thing it seems to me that, unlike Google, Overture has a human element that, well...it almost seems that a pair of human eyes looks at all content too....as I'm sure you noticed that it's much harder to get the same results that we've previously achieved w/ googling around .....

So I'm all ears...I'd love to hear any and all your opinions about OVERTURE, it's strengthened presence in Yahoo and altavista, hotbot,etc and who has taken the half-hour needed to fill out questionairs required to register a URL w/ them...

DAREN!
http://WebPageTurner.com

[janeth]

I like http://www.altavista.com/ and http://www.webworldindex.com/

These are the two I would like to see do something.

The problem with Overture is the main results come from paid listings. The more you pay the better results you get.

Now correct me if I'm wrong but that is my understanding

I like http://www.altavista.com/ and http://www.webworldindex.com/

These are the two I would like to see do something.

The problem with Overture is the main results come from paid listings. The more you pay the better results you get.

Now correct me if I'm wrong but that is my understanding

Thanks Janeth.....that's exactly what it looks like to me......they go right for your money halfway into the 1/2 hour "entry form"

They're pretty cryptic about their whole operation too.....

DAREN!
http://WebPageTurner.com

(MOD edit: final sentence deleted)
"ooops sorry David...my bad!"
dt

[kjohnson5576]

You're right Janeth. I recently did a couple of weeks with Overture. I paid heavily. I did good business, but the costs are outrageous. I was burning about $180 a day to get in the top 6 of most the keyword catagories. I don't know about you guys, but my margins aren't high enough to support that kind of advertising. Which goes to show you...Overture's results really rip off the average guy on the net looking for something. Those who can afford to rank at 1-5 are paying heavily (about $1.00 click), and with a number of them, the price of their product is 3-4X what I am selling for the same or similar item. Is the consumer (searcher) actually benefiting?

Kent
www.discount-leather.net

[janeth]

Hi kjohnson5576,

That is a lot of money.

Anybody
Who do you think is the best for ppc?

[kjohnson5576]

Janeth,

You wouldn't believe the amount of money I put out in advertising since the Google Dance...even to Google. Most days though, I have made a decent return. It is the Holiday Season. I bet things calm down after the 25th.

[janeth]

Out of all of them who worked best for you?

Also did you get all your key words back?

We seem to have gotten all of ours plus some extra ones and we also droped about 1,500 words of text off our home page.

[kjohnson5576]

I wish I knew for sure. I ran out of money in my overture account and didn't put any more in Saturday to try and check the effectiveness of Google Adwords. In increased the amount per day I 'm spending on Google, and adjusted my keyword price to try and be in the top 6 or so advertising spots for the major keywords that bring in sales. My sales are down significantly without Overture, so I do think Overture works pretty well. It's just very expensive. Also, Overture doesn't let you cap a daily spending amount like Google Adwords, so it's hard to budget for them.

Since I put in a new shopping cart system, my conversion tracking scripts aren't being hit nearly as often just due to the nature of the shopping cart. So I'm somewhat running blind. I've been taking a look at the day to day total sales, total advertising and total cost of goods to make sure I'm not losing money. So far, I'm still in the black.

I haven't regained all of the rankings I previously had with Google, but I am ranked high on those keywords that really matter, so I can't complain. I'll just keep working on it.

[oppsales]

Hi everyone...i felt compelled to reply, as i can totally relate to large overture bills, wont go into how much...but i have to say it does work. and with regard to not getting immediate results or return on the same day as advertising...here is what i have noticed. alot of people come back. make sure you have a prominent place for a "bookmark this site" option. We paid alot for overture in the past and still do today and i have to say the benefit isnt always seen same day it an be 1-3 days or even weeks later. just my 0.02

[janeth]

Hi oppsales,
The problem is that if it takes weeks to see and it cost $180 a day. We would go broke fast.

[oppsales]

Hi janeth

i totally understand I am a small business owner myself. But unfortunetly as we all know, and have witnessed, that is the way it is on the WWW these days. Long gone are the days we had placement for free. I wish it was still free, but isn't and sometimes you have to spend to receive. To the gentleman who wrote in about the 180.00/day..If the 180.00 is too much then watch your traffic patterns and see when you get the most orders. After that time bring down your overture bid so that it isnt 180.00 a day. i know for us we get the majority of our business from 10am-4pm and then 8pm-2am. Now of course i cant adjust my account all the time but i keep myself in the mix for about 68.00 a day. And i get great results. alot of the people who ordered from me for christmas came back to me for valentines day.

[kjohnson5576]

Good idea. I hadn't thought of that. That is a darn good way to keep cost down.

[janeth]

I think we are going to try it also and do it the same way

[greeneagle]

Biography of President George W. Bush
Biography of the 43rd President of the United States.
www.whitehouse.gov (additional listing)

only comes up as #5 on Overture under "miserable failure"

Looks pretty safe!

Please don't take offense!

Bombs and Blogs adversly affect the entire Internet, primarily because almost every search engine is including a "freshness" factor these days!

Ken

[capsman]

We have used both of these very heavily over the last year or so. I think Overture actually does a better job for us and I like the system better. You have a better control of your money compared to google. But there is no question Google gives you many more "views".

Thankfully for us our web site has started to give us top ranking in many areas (except for my scroogled google phrases) and we have been able to reduce our PPC cost for many phrases as we are already well placed. Google has forced us to pay heavily recently as we were wiped out for a couple of key phrases for us.

You do need to keep a close watch though as competitors can play games with you with day to day changes.

Capsman

[kjohnson5576]

Better Control of your money?

I find just the opposite. On Google, I can cap a days advertising expenses. I would have to fiddle with each keyword in Overture a couple of times a day to do the same.

I will say, Google doesn't seem to deliver buying traffic like Overture does and no matter who you use, instead of working on your site and your customers, your spending time playing with keyword bids to either lower your cost or boost your rankings. Expensive either way.

Good for the searcher? Hardly. Deep pockets seem to win.

[janeth]

It sounds like you both agree Overture would be the best place to put your money.

It will be the first of next year but I think we are going to play with it some and see what happenes.

[capsman]

I should have been clearer on my response. I am less concerned about controling my spending than I am controlling performance. I have just seen a better return on my investment from Overture than I have from Google. Although the page views are better with Google and I spend more with Google I feeel the method of placement on Overture gives better credibility than a box on the side as Adwords gives. This has led to better return on my $ which is more important to me than how much I spend.

Capsman

[geoffreygag]

Overture does deliver, it can be costly.

I tried overture with several sites. My COSTLY problem was that I was testing with highly searched terms in Spanish. Flores = Flowers and
Tarjetas = cards.

When broke the search terms down, i would drastically loose the clicks.

The remedy was to work with New York and Los Angeles time zones and increase bid during peak hours.

It boils down to your product and its net return versus cost per sale.

[butte_porter]

Overture does a terrible job of validating your clicks.

Be prepared to pay a good percentage of your advertising budget as the result of your competitors clicking on your links - especially if you are bidding on high value keywords. They will tell you that they are vigilant but they fail miserable on filtering clicks even within their manager. I wrote a paper on my recent experiences with Overture.

http://perlworks.com/papers/overture-click-protection-12_10_03.html

OK hey i just was reading though all the posts.....thanx for all the info it seems that in a nutshell then Overture is a great SE if your cashflow is already there and your money is already in the bank and can afford to buy out all the adwords out from under your starving competitors feet. so i guess it's "welcome back to america" as this is not really big news in the big picture just par for the course in american economic darwinism

that being said....who can answer me this: if you query Overture for " blast, hurricane safety glass " [which is a huge and vast market especially down here in South FLorida]....the #2 return on Overture is
http://securityimpactglass.com
when I pointed this out to my client they loved it of course.....
after designing the site [company builds & supplies architects w/ safety construction glass], i never submitted anything to Overture (or Google for that matter)....never paid a penny.....etc....
i just made a real googleBot friendly website, with a solid meta/title template on all html pages.....there is great content on all pages too (in addition to all the swf movies & tables & stat charts) which is specific each title/meta template

why did this site become so Overture friendly for these choice keywords in the thriving & highly competitave safety glass market here in hurricane strewn South Florida?
perhaps this still proves that content is still king?!.....

thanks folks---any thoughts appreciated!....

DAREN
http://WebPageTurner.com

[jkwilson78]

I could be wrong but I believe Inktomi fills Overture results that are not filled up with keyword bids.

Maybe your site is one of the few that gets mysteriously added to Inktomi for free.

First thing that popped to mind.

Jeremy

[tiffyk1980]

I manage a lot of our custmer's SE marketing. Most of our customers rather manually submit their sites. We have a customer who list on ebay, overture and google. He cut his overture and lost $40,000.00 in one day. He cut his google and lost 10,000.00 and He actally refused to tell me how much he lost on ebay ;).

His keywords are as narrowed down as can be, so when someone types in 'used golf balls', he is usually one of the first 3.

I have yet to try overture for my own company, but have done for some of my clients, everyone has nothing but good words to say about the income, (but we do all of the foot work :)

[joelkatona]

Our experiences have been very good with Overture. Even though on some of the keywords we bid as high as $3-$4, currently our spending is around $30-40 a day and getting descent returns on our investment. I must admit, we do watch closely our server logs and actual conversions so we are running a very focused campaign.
We have started with Addwords in August and started up an Overture campaign later. It was actually very helpful to switch to Overture after having some experience with Addwords. It helped us narrow down the almost 400 keywords we use on Google. We picked the best keywords based on click throughs, and conversion after a month on Google Addwords.
On both systems we have broad keyword matching enabled, although it creates a lot more impressions but we are still above .7% click through overall.

I personally prefer the Google Addwords interface, it seems to be a lot more responsive and changing adds is a snap compared to waiting up to 48 hours for Overture to update our adds.
The bottom line is Overture can put your adds in front of an audience Google Addwords can not reach, so in my opinion you have to be where ever you can find “eye balls”.

[HillsCap]

Interesting... I've never done PPC.

In fact, I never submitted to Overture, Teoma, etc., but we rank pretty well in them. They must have spidered our site by following links.

We used to rank #16 in Google, now we're down at (gaahh!) 569. Good thing our ranking in other search engines hasn't been affected. November 30 our site had the most traffic ever.

Anyway, my boss wants to get 30 qualified leads a day from the internet, and I'm wondering a few things:

1) Which search engine(s) to use?
2) How much will this cost us?
3) Effective means of filtering out the Looky-Lou's and the tire-kickers, and only getting truly interested people to click the ads?
4) Other means of cost-outlay reduction?
5) Is it cost-effective (keeping in mind that we're not selling a product... we provide a service from which we receive commission... most of our clients we've had for years).
6) How does this stack up to, say, buying the hot leads from our other leads sources (very effective leads, by the way, with an approximate 20% response / client conversion rate) that cost $18 / lead (which would work out to a total cost of approximately $90 to attain each new client)? Even at that rate, the commission more than pays back the cost of client acquisition within a week of acquiring that new client.

[Telic]

Guys,

This is my first time posting. I get very little time to read message boards or respond to posts but in this case I thought I might be able to be of some assistance.

We teach advertiser workshops for Overture, and visit cities across the US (usually one per month) teaching folks how to get the most out of their Overture campaign. The three founding partners of our company are all former Overture Alumni who left about 2 years ago to form our own search engine marketing company. We manage pay per click campaigns for larger advertisers across all the various pay per click engines large and small.

Obviously, we have a little familiarity with Overture <grin> so maybe I can be of some assistance in aswering some of your questions.

In terms of whether Overture is more effective than Google: Short Answer, it depends. Our clients have different results on each engine, depending on the channel they market to, the cost of their product, their ability to bid higher for clicks, and the way we structure their campaign. Some clients do better on Google, some do better on Overture and some do better on the smaller PPC engines, as their profit margin won't support Overture or Google clicks.

As to whom is the most expensive: you can control both Overture and Google prices. On Google you set a daily limit, on Overture you set a monthly limit and use one of the many very effective bid management tools to control your spending.

Paying a lot per day? You're bidding on too few, too expensive keywords. Your success on Overture and Google is going to be determined by finding niche keywords that are still very targeted, but are not too expensive. Unless you are a large advertiser, with a large marketing budget and a huge profit margin, you will spend a large amount of money if you just go after the very obvious keywords that customers might use to find your product. The highest conversions come from the niche keywords that show a customer is committed to buy because they have done their homework. Use the Search Term Suggestion Tool on Overture, or Wordtracker, and come up with many keywords that your competitors may not have thought of. The amount of clicks will be lower but your conversion rate will be higher. The most successful advertisers on Google and Overture have between 500 - 5000 keywords. If you play with 25 or 30 you are truly missing the boat.

With any kind of PPC campaign, unless you are tracking by keyword you are losing a lot of money. It can take as many as 4 clicks for someone to buy after visiting your site for the first time. If you just judge the campaign by the amount of clicks and the sales from the first visit you will miss as much as 30% of sales and can not make a clear determination if something is working. At the most basic level, use the free tracking tools that Overture and Google provide. If you are serious about PPC marketing, purchase a tracking solution. Tweaking your keywords and bids constantly allows you to find that sweet spot where you are only spending as much as you need to get good results. You can't tweak, if you can't track.

As far as bidding goes - don't assume that just because your competitor is in the number 1 spot paying $5 bucks per click, that you will be successful if you bid above him. Your bid should be based on:
1) Your profit margin
2) Your conversion rate
3) Your targeted cost per acquisition
4) ROI
5) Latency
6) Lifetime Value

You can get all the clicks you want using any PPC engine, but if you can't convert them, or your profit margin isn't high enough to support your bids, you will go out of business fast.


The success of your Overture or Google clickthroughs is determined in large part by your ability to select keywords and write advertising copy. With Overture, your copy should be very clear, factual and non salesy, as this creates higher credibility in the mind of the user, and results in a higher clickthrough. Conversions are different. Conversions are much more determined by the style and navigation on your site and your product offering. A conversion rate increase of 1% can be the difference between profit and loss, so you need to constantly play with your site to see what works.

Both Overture and Google can be very effectively used for lead generation. It's very hard to track results on this especially if you are encouraging customers to call you rather than fill out an online RFP, but one simple method is to use a different 800 number for each SE campaign. 800 numbers are quite inexpensive now, and that way you can easily determine what is causing the phone to ring and the quality of the leads.

I hope that helps. I didn't mean to write the "Great American Novel" but there is so little information out there about pay per click, I thought maybe I'd pitch in. You can spend a lot of money very fast with PPC for very little return if you don't know what you are doing. If you get it right the returns are huge. We have many clients getting a great conversion rate from their sites, so the returns are there, you just have to experiment, not expose yourself too much and watch it like a hawk.

I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have, I just don't have mush time to do it, so I apologize in advance it if takes me a few days to get back here.

Cheers, Mary ;)
www.trafficmentorseo.com