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I find that having an advertising campaign with Overture is more risky,
in the sense that they cannot prevent click spamming that well. I would like
to know what everyone else thinks? How effective is Overture's filtering process.
Even on my engagement process (free sign-up) I get a far higher response from Overture.
For the past 6 months, the engagement numbers are:
49% Overture
33% Google
Also, what kind of advertising budget to you have. I know this may be a little
personal so not to get to specific:
a) 0-999$
b) $1000-4999$
c) >5000$
Also, do you find that you get alot of clicking spam?
This question comes up all the time.
It can't be answered do to the fact that it will depend on your industry, KW set and YOUR site + pricing etc. Everyone will see different results in those 2 PPCs.
Click spam will also depend on what industry. I hear that there are 2 that get a lot.
Also, do you have any of the recent threads on this issue readily on hand?
>other threads
Let's not go there because there is nothing we can do about it here at WebmasterWorld.
Those with click spam issues should take it up with Overture.
My monthly budget is north of $5k, so there are plenty of results to measure. The site I referred to above to is consumer lifestyle. I manage campaigns on dozens of others, including technical B2B, and although the results do vary, Overture outperforms Google by a large margin. Lest anyone think there might be a bias, if I have any, it would be in favor Google - working with Overture is always nothing short of painful. The numbers however are irrefutable.
I wouldn't consider doing a PPC campaign without rigorous ROI tracking - it's too easy to get robbed. I had been under water with every 2nd tier engine until I reported click fraud. Some gave refunds, some did not. It took a lot of effort to get refunds from those that had the integrity to give refunds on bad traffic. No one has a sensible ongoing reporting refund mechanism.
I'd be interested to hear other people's experiences.
I have found that my ROI is also far greater with Google then it is with Overture. I have used Overture since January and started using Google in April. I have been very meticulous with my ROI tracking and for me it hasn't been close. I stopped using Overture when they came out with Match Driver because my keywords were almost cut in half and I cannot compete (very small advertising budget) with the bigger players.
In a traditional business model, these people would be brought before the court, and thrown in
jail.
Things need to change. Fraud is Fraud and we need some criminal prosecutions for this to stop.
On many postings here you will see people saying they deliberately use tools like Autobid to drive up the price of their competitors and then click on the ads. Surely that must be fraud? It's a malicious attempt to take money away from one of someone's competitors....... or is it good business practice/tactical bidding?
This is one of the main reasons why companies must have in place an industrial strength traffic management solution, to monitor the activity of clicks and raise any inconsistencies with the providers.
Click fraud is obvious
I have to say that to the majority of advertisers click fraud will not be obvious at all. The example used may not lead to the conclusion that fraud is taking place, it may be the profile of the searchers is different (which is why you get such widely different results on Overture/Google etc..
In some cases it will be obvious, in others it won't, each "fraudster" will try different things to come in under the radar.
When I say click fraud is obvious, I mean that click fraud is obvious when you look at the data, and that usually means putting in systems to calculate ROI on a per-keyword and per-referrer basis. When you see variances, there should be an explanation. If the explanation is valid, it's not fraud. When you see the source of the traffic (or can't determine the source of the traffic, or determine timing that make you conclude that the traffic is artificial in source) you can conclude with a high degree of confidence whether you are looking at fraud.
Bottom line: it's just not that hard if you have the right systems in place and you review the numbers regularly.
I have used my ROI tracking systems to get substantial refunds from PPC engines. Some have agreed to monthly review and refunds, the others I dropped.
The difficult part is wrangling the beaurocracy of the PPC to get your refund. It can be done, and I urge everyone to report results, request refunds where applicable, and start lobbying for automated reporting systems. When the PPC engines can easily correlate low conversions across multiple advertisers, the fraudsters will not have long to play.
Can you tell me where it shows up so that you can mesure it - I'd love to record this info. but I don't know how :(
regards, Jarboy
I define a "referrer" as the web site whose visitor generates the click to your site.
Google (and to a much lesser degree Overture) show up in my ROI calculator as both aggregators and referrers.
It's important to make the distinction in your stats because you change the bid at the aggregator level, but get refunds on the referrer level.
You have to set up tracking mechanism to separate out the two sources, and it's usually essential to have a persistant visitor identity (cookies or user-id login) unless your visitors never return to engage or buy. There are add-ons for Apache like mod_usertrack that are helpful, but are not required.
Good planning of what you are tracking, why, and what you will do with the information once you have it are the most important tools. If you have planned your business process in sufficient detail, the implementation is usually the easy part.
I'm currently writing a paper on how to accomplish good ROI analysis, stickymail me if you're interested, I'll send you a copy when it's done (a lot of stickymails will accelerate the process of finishing it).
Good luck.
W3C defines "referer" as:
"the address ( URI ) of the document (or element within the document) from which the URI in the request was obtained."
Not sure why they dropped the extra r in the spec(superfluous? carpal tunnel? spell check off? C programmers roll their own?)
In any case, look for referer in your config, not referrer.
ppc money spent on advertising profitgoogle $60.00 $800.00
OV $100.00 $100.00
I sell (a single piece of) educational sofware. My sales with
Google really kicked in when I got listed on AOL. Keywords are
very similar.
I never got listed on MSN with OV, because I don't fit into their "categories". For me the choice is pretty obvious.
On avg. overture kwds are about 5 times more expensive for
me than adwords'
